Her studies for her bat mitzvah introduced her to the kosher dietary laws and the Jewish Sabbath. That she knew little, if anything, about Jewish practices did not faze her.

That Traig was raised by a Catholic mother and Jewish father, where pork and shrimp eating were de rigueur, probably only exacerbated her condition – especially once Traig decided, at the onset of her bat mitzvah and subsequent “official” conversion to Judaism, to become an observant Jew. Called Scrupulosity, it is, Traig explains in her book, “a hyperreligious form of obsessive compulsive disorder.”Īmongst her multitude of quirks were an overwhelming need at times to “drop to my knees and pray in the middle of student council meetings, and sometimes I had to hide under the bleachers and chant psalms.” However, she also suffered from a rare form of OCD which wasn’t diagnosed until she was much older. For Traig was no “ordinary” teenager.įrom the ages of 12 to 18, Traig suffered from a slew of Obsessive Compulsive Disorders (OCD): the most common being the obsessive hand washing and several stints with anorexia. Yet in her debut memoir, Devil in the Details, Jennifer Traig makes a conscious decision to return to her California adolescence of the late 70s and early 80s – an adolescence that is at turns harrowing and humorous. But, invariably they do – with the former pubescents from Hell moving on to productive adult lives. It’s a wonder sometimes how both the teenagers and the parents survive. Endless hours on the telephone, picky eating habits, emotional outbursts. CLR Devil In DisguiseĪll parents of adolescents despair of them, particularly those with teenage daughters. Devil In The Details by Jennifer Traig Little, Brown & Company, 246 pp.

Devil in the Details by Jennifer Traig