About a week ago, I received a copy of Jennifer Traig’s new memoir,
Devil in the Details : Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood. You can read the basics elsewhere – basically, the book’s blurb frames it as a story about a girl growing up with obsessive-compulsive disorder who latches onto the elaborate practice of Jewish ritual (particularly the kosher laws) in a funny yet unhealthy way.
That’s kind of what happens in the book, but the plot isn’t ultimately what matters here. Traig bounces back and forth chronologically, and it’s difficult to find a straightforward narrative – anecdotes are superficially clustered together around a given theme (laid out in the beginning of each chapter), but she just sort of roams through her childhood, telling entertaining stories and laughing along with us at her own exploits.
In terms of the writing, this is a damned funny book, plain and simple. Traig nails an authorial voice that echoes the amused mortification of David Sedaris, and the portrait she paints of her home life crackles with vitality. The thing to keep in mind, however, is that she never really lets down her guard and stops laughing at herself long enough to take herself seriously, which is a shame because buried in this book is a hyperbolic example of a problem that many (if not most) younger Jews face today.
Traig introduces herself as a girl who grew up in a town with no real Jewish community, in a home which was, in many ways, conflicted about religion, and when she began to try to figure out her Jewish identity, she was more or less on her own. Of course, her particular spiritual journey (at least, as she frames it) was driven less by a desire to explore the religion than by an unhealthy obsession with practice, but by emphasizing practice to the point that it becomes meaningless outside of her own idiosyncratic blend of tics and compulsions, she highlights the tension between doing things and the underlying reasons for doing things.
This is something that is more than just a laughing matter, and something which I’d wager resonates as strongly with other Jews my age as it did with me. We grow up as minorities, aware that we’re different somehow; wanting to be like everyone else and yet not comfortable with the idea of completely assimilating. Traig’s memoir reminded me of Lisa Schiffman’s recent book Generation J, which chronicles the author’s attempt to reconcile her own ambivalence about being Jewish and doing Jewish, and the two books complement each other nicely. The difference here is that Traig wasn’t acting purely rationally – she avoided mixing milk and meat, or doing work on shabbat, because these rules offered a justification for her OCD. Her story is food for thought, reminding us that most of us are making an actual choice to practice (or not practice) religion by introducing us to an endearingly odd young girl who didn’t have that luxury.
