Just Checking [Hardcover]

Emily Colas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1998

As my friend the heroin addict says, "You're only as sick as your secrets." Emily Colas -- young, intelligent, well-educated wife and mother of two -- had a secret that was getting in the way of certain activities. Like touching people. Having a normal relationship with her husband. Socializing. Getting a job. Eating out. Like leaving the house. Don't get me wrong. I have no hallucinations, no aliens telling me what to do. Just extreme and intrusive neurotic thoughts. Insanity lite. This raw, darkly comic series of astonishing vignettes is Emily Colas' achingly honest chronicle of her twisted journey through the obsessive-compulsive disorder that came to dominate her world. In the beginning it was germs and food -- to her mind, anything from ground-up hypodermic needles to disease-tainted blood could be on her restaurant plate. By the time she faced the fact that she was really "losing it," Colas had become a slave to her own "hobbies," from the frenetic daily hair trims she gave herself to the incessant inspections of her children's clothes for bloodstains, the carpet for dangerous debris, packaged goods for possible tampering. Soon there was no interval in Colas' life when she was not just checking. In order to create harmonious home environment, I decided to become a liar. I decided to stop telling my husband about my worries. Although at first Colas confided her myriad fears to her husband -- who for years colluded by serving as his wife's shield from the world -- eventually the "worries" she tried to hide took an inevitable toll on their marriage. They agreed she would seek therapy. It was not an easy outing. Struggling to reassure herself that she hadn't been exposed to pernicious germs on her "get well" trip, that the therapist didn't have any cuts or cold sores, that her quick scan of the chair she'd sat in hadn't missed any bloodstains, she rushed home to lock herself in the bathroom. As her husband pounded on the door, Colas was busy figuring out a way to convince him that she didn't really need therapy. While she scoured the tiles. When I can't handle the world, I clean it. Even when her behavior is at its most peculiar, Colas is talented at taking us inside her head, exposing a soul tormented but balanced by a judicious self-view -- and a piercing sense of humor that may be her saving grace. Her obsessions spiral out of control, yet a buoyance of spirit deep within Emily Colas conveys the possibility of hope. We sense that if there is a way out of this madness, she will find it. Just Checking is a shocking, hilarious, enormously appealing account of a young woman struggling to gain control of her life -- and of the important distinction between garden-variety neuroses and a life-altering disorder.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

What could have been a fascinating exploration of a complex psyche never gets much beyond the level of stand-up comedy in this disappointing memoir of a young woman's life with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Substituting sarcasm for insight, Colas presents brief, easily digestible tidbits describing her overwhelming fear that she might catch diseases from strangers. She recounts her bizarre rituals of handwashing, garbage disposal, 800-number calling (is this product really safe?) that eventually hurt others and destroyed her marriage. Colas can be funny ?(an episode of the stranger's underpants in the laundromat dryer is especially amusing ("I called my OB to ask her if she'd be willing to test me for gonorrhea")?but her flat prose and superficial approach mask an intelligence that's never sufficiently engaged with this material?a typical analysis is, "It sucks big time." Though Colas provides occasional glimpses of a disturbed childhood, she quickly covers them up with her flippant comic routine. She's disappointed that her illness is less interesting than heroin addiction?it's just "insanity lite," she writes, and "Rock stars don't get magazine covers because they kept their audience waiting while they washed their hands twenty times." By keeping her book at the level of a Seinfeld routine, Colas ensures that readers will gain little insight into a condition that deserves better treatment than it gets in this memoir lite.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Colas worries a lot. She fears that the baby-sitter is using the family's toothbrushes. She suspects someone has tampered with her Cap'n Crunch. An obsessive-compulsive mother of two, Colas makes worry an art. This anecdotal, first-person account of Colas' illness is highly readable and funny. It also benefits from one of the symptoms of the illness (which affects 2.5 percent of Americans over the life course): a vague awareness that something is awry. At its best, Just Checking is a lighthearted glimpse of a treatable illness. But it's not the whole story. After she runs over a chipmunk, Colas repeatedly returns to the scene to verify that she has not killed a child. Behind the comic behaviors that Colas emphasizes is a gnawing disorder that is often painful and frightening. One hopes that Colas will take up her pen again, explore this part of her experience, and risk the darkness. Lee Reilly

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Atria (July 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067102437X
• ISBN-13: 978-0671024376
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #944,722 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sharp, Funny Vignettes, November 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Just Checking (Hardcover)

What I haven't noticed in reviews posted here is a description of this book's form. It's not a continuous narrative; rather, it's made up out of sharp vignettes which each have a title taken from a popular phrase. This does give it the feel of a stand-up routine, of linked pieces, rather than an organic story. However, Colas's intelligent witty writing is not only humorous, but also is one of the best presentations of how "logical" OCD-caused rituals can seem to those who suffer from it and how you become trapped inside your own head with no reference to reality. I did wish the book longer and for it to have a more coherent structure, but it's an amazing first book and a genuinely good entry into the exponentially expanding field of literature deadling with psychological illness -- both in the sense of being well-written and in describing symptoms. People who have relatives or loved ones who suffer from OCD might especially want to read this book for its black humor and excellent descriptions of how it _feels_ to have something most people can't even begin to understand.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Do Not Take This Book To Lunch, November 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Just Checking: Scenes from the life of an obsessive-compulsive (Paperback)

You will experience great difficulty returning to work. Also, you may exhibit some strange checking behavior while eating your BLT.

Exhausting. The guilt I felt in deriving enjoyment from Colas' tale of insanity was tempered only by the recognition that facing the brink is just a matter of degrees. Nearly everyone could find a suitable diagnosis at some point in their lives, whether chemical or situational. Few, however, could find the humor to expose their disturbing mental processes as adeptly as Colas has.

I hope that in sharing her story, Emily Colas has derived a great deal of therapeutic benefit. I know I have.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I don't know . . ., March 25, 2002

By 

dreadful light (Nicholasville, KY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Just Checking: Scenes from the life of an obsessive-compulsive (Paperback)

Emily Colas' memoir, Just Checking, is like an uncomfortable stand-up comedy routine. Broken into small chunks of conversational writing with sometimes interesting, sometimes bewildering headings (for example, "Mussolini Ate His Penie"), Colas' account jumps frantically from past to present, her childhood events to her typical day-to-day life as a wife and mother. It's sometimes hard to follow where exactly we are at any given time--and if that's intentional, I'm not sure it really works.

There are some terribly intense, disturbing moments (such as when Colas' apartment fills with garbage and dirt because she becomes wary of cleaning supplies, and she refuses to take a shower for fear of harming her unborn child), but overall the book floats glibly from event to event, nearly discounting Colas' painful descent into the illness. I know that this is was an extremely uncomfortable story to tell, and I like the approach of bringing humor to a subject that normally isn't very funny, but there are times when the writing backs away when it should have really delved deeper.