Review by New York Times Review
amanda stern knew there was something different about her but it didn't have a name. As a child, she recognized that her brain and body were not in sync with the world around her. Maybe her mother would die or forget that she loved her. "How come no one except me understands that my heart must be near my mom's heart in order for us both to survive?" she wondered. She resolved to stay close to home; her very existence was at stake. Early on in Stern's resonant and often funny memoir, "Little Panic," we learn that only at 25 did she discover the culprit for her symptoms: panic disorder. Her story, set largely in childhood and adolescence, hinges on her quest to understand why her operating system is out of whack. When she finds out that what she's suffered from all her life has a name, this news is delivered matter-of-factly by her mother's therapist. "I don't understand how it's taken this long for someone to diagnose you," he says. I wondered the same thing. Beginning at an early age, Stern was tested by doctors, specialists and tutors. She was evaluated for visual, learning and hearing disabilities; cognitive impairments; ambidexterity; motor-skill deficits. She was measured and scored by an endless array of adults, all of whom seemed oblivious to her actual symptoms. Stern believed herself to be defective, crazy and dumb. Upon receiving her diagnosis, she reflects, "I've spent my entire life battling some impossible, invisible plague no one ever seemed to see, and this guy did it with such ease, as though panic disorder is easy to establish, obvious to anyone who would take the time to ask what my symptoms were." The statement is all the more remarkable given that Stern was raised in Manhattan, the epicenter of neurotic behavior - not to mention shrinks. Yet everyone, including her mother, seemed to be looking in the wrong place, colluding in a misplaced vigilance focused on Stern's intellectual performance, physical health and adaptability rather than her feelings. As a child, Stern shuttles between a brownstone in Greenwich Village, which she shares with her bohemian mother and siblings, and her remarried father's apartment in an affluent neighborhood uptown, where "a weekend lasts an entire month." When 6-year-old Etan Patz disappears nearby in 1979, the police come to Stern's mother's house asking about the boy, and Stern internalizes an ominous message: "My mom always tells me bad things like that don't happen to kids. But I know they do." Patz's disappearance haunts her for years to come. When the "Still Missing" posters in SoHo are plastered over, she is furious. How will anyone find him? When she and her mother walk past buildings, she wonders whether he's inside, waiting to be discovered. In college, during a spiral of panic, she is overcome with guilt. Maybe she didn't look for him hard enough, or in the right places. As the narrative moves through Stern's middle and high school years, ordinary slights, like being left out of a group sleepover at a friend's house, take on catastrophic proportions, triggering what she doesn't know at the time are panic attacks. As a teenager, she finds fleeting relief in drugs and inappropriate sexual encounters. But panic remains a knot she can't untangle. At times, Stern's obsessive ruminations can be exhausting. I wanted to shake her and say, "Get some perspective," but this is precisely the point: For a person with panic disorder, perspective is impossible. While the supposed tension of the book rests on a discovery - the diagnosis Stern finally receives - the real tension lies in how and whether she will evolve in spite of it. Do the cumulative insights lead to ways to tolerate discomfort and uncertainty? After her ailment is named, she writes, "the relief, like my panic, is all-encompassing and everywhere. It's in the pollen dusted on cars, the dirty pacifier lost in the gutter." Yet it will take her 20 more years before she can manage the feelings of helplessness that accompany her attacks. Eventually Stern learns that she's not made of paper and won't blow away. All the times she thought she would die, she didn't. And some of the "terrifying" things she thought would happen actually did; she didn't get married, she didn't have children. But nevertheless she adapted and flourished in other ways, like founding the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series. "Here I am now," she writes, "living inside the very future I feared, imagining it would kill me. Yet I am O.K. I am alive." ? ariel leve is a journalist and the author of a memoir, "An Abbreviated Life."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 15, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
Despite its title, this book is big. In 44 chapters with headings like Maybe I Am Not a Person, Stern writes about how anxiety shaped her life, and not for the better, beginning with her childhood, when she dreads leaving her beautiful, eccentric mom, who she believes needs her protection. Somehow, Stern has succeeded in writing an often-funny tale about mental illness. For example, she explains her belief that a local Mafia figure, Jimmy Alcatraz, keeps her Lower Manhattan neighborhood safe. Stern recounts how, though clearly intelligent, she performs poorly on traditional school tests, which causes problems with college admissions: I can't even get into what is other people's safety school. A guy stalks her; she chooses a bad boyfriend. Until she turns 25, she doesn't know what's wrong with her. Today, at 47, she realizes that left untreated, anxiety disorders, like fingernails, grow with a person. Don't expect a traditional happily-ever-after ending; but don't expect a gloomy one, either. Stern's story is a good reminder that all people, including those who learn differently, need empathy and human connection.--Springen, Karen Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Stern (The Long Haul) courageously lays open her excruciating experience with 25 years of untreated panic disorder in this brave memoir of mental illness. From the time she was a small child growing up in New York City, Stern found terrifying possibilities in everything-what would happen if she lost her mother or she herself was kidnapped, what if her family lost their house, what if the constant testing of her intelligence revealed what she suspects. that she is different from all other children. She is eight years old at the time her worst fears are made real in 1979, when six-year-old Etan Patz-who lived mere blocks from her family's Greenwich Village rowhouse on MacDougal Street- disappears without a trace, and Stern's close friend Melissa dies of a brain tumor. Before she found her considerable talents in the theater and in writing, Stern tried coping through unhealthy behaviors, including an increasing dependence on cocaine. Failed relationships further reinforced Stern's feeling that there was something broken inside her, along with the heartbreaking belief that her constant worrying kept those she loved safe from harm. Readers who have had panic attacks or have experience with a similar disorder will instantly relate to Stern's experiences; those who do not will come to understand the disease's terrifying power-and the utter relief that comes when it is finally identified and treated. Honest and deeply felt, Stern's story delivers a raw window into the terrifying world of panic disorders. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Novelist (The Long Haul) and middle-grade author ("Frankly Frannie" series) Stern outlines her childhood and adolescence with a series of vignettes that slowly unravel her anxious life in New York City. She intertwines conversations with neighbors, friends, and teachers with doctors' appointments and notes in her medical files. The tension only increases when a child is abducted a mere few blocks from her home. A tense home life and lack of mental health awareness creates frustration. The author's acute attention to detail and conversational tone will capture readers' attention, as she gives voice to young people who might also be struggling with similar situations and could learn from the challenges she faced. VERDICT This accessible personal narrative is for readers who have been touched by divorce, anxiety, or are looking for a new perspective through memories of -childhood.-Meghan Dowell, Beloit Coll., WI © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Stern (The Long Haul, 2003) offers a searing memoir about her lifelong panic disorder.In a series of mostly brief chapters, most of which could function as stand-alone mini-essays, the author proves, as other memoirists have before her, that looking away from a train wreck can be nearly impossible. The riveting story is mostly chronological, as Stern deals with her daily fears up to age 25, the age when a therapist finally provided the proper medical term for her outsized anxieties. "The matter-of-factness with which [the therapist has] said all these life-altering things astonishes me," she writes of that revelation. "I've spent my entire life battling some impossible, invisible plague no one ever seemed to see, and this guy did it with such ease, as though panic disorder is easy to establish, obvious to anyone who would take the time to ask what my symptoms were; textbook, even." At times, the author jumps ahead to the current decade, as she approaches 50. In her recent years, she has been thinking seriously about becoming a mother. As a result, she explores the science of freezing her eggs until she can identify a suitable sperm donor. Eventually, she decided that the move would be too risky. With a loving mother, a compassionate stepfather, stable siblings, admirable schoolteachers, and at least a couple of competent therapists, the author seemingly faced good odds of shedding her panic disorder and resulting anxieties. However, as she shows, she has had to battle anxieties nearly every day, with occasional patches of worry-free hours. In one of the chapters, Stern shares with readers a day-by-day account of a full week, conveying what it is like inside her head. At the end of selected chapters, the author includes actual paragraphs from the reports of multiple therapists she consulted, sometimes willingly, sometimes under duress.Stern is such a skilled stylistand such an unforgiving judge of herselfthat the memoir radiates a morbid fascination. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
