Everything is an Emergency

Starred review from April 6, 2020
In this candid examination of life with obsessive-compulsive disorder, New Yorker cartoonist Katzenstein draws his brain as a broken record. “Your hands are dirty. Scrtchh. Your hands are dirty. Scrtchh. Your hands—.” Katzenstein succinctly conveys what it feels like to be trapped in a mental loop dominated by panic, guilt, and fears of “contamination.” Sometimes he’s a sweaty Sisyphus, mentally pushing a boulder up a hill even as he builds a relatively happy life in New York City; sometimes he’s swirling in an isolation, unable to get out of bed. For years, Katzenstein has managed day-to-day with the mantra—born of an acid trip that freed him briefly—“find the seconds that feel okay and live in them.” But eventually he realizes that to stretch out seconds into livable days, he has to accept the professional help he’s long resisted, and face his anxieties head-on. The moment he’s finally able to sit on a public toilet seat, he feels like a superhero. Katzenstein’s drawings range from broad caricature to genuinely creepy replays of darker fears. This refreshing and accessible debut, with crossover potential for older teens, will be a welcome addition to the growing canon of graphic medicine. Agent: Dan Mandel, Sanford J. Greenburger Assoc.

April 1, 2020

Cartoonist Katzenstein (The White Man's Guide to White Male Writers of the Western Canon) begins this insightful memoir about his lifelong struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) with an overview of the many things he feared as a child before going on to explore how his parents' divorce resulted in crippling anxiety and a need for control. In his early adolescence, he struggles with body image and develops a compulsion to pick up litter that ends only when he develops a terrible fear of contamination. Drawing and painting provide a respite from his looping thoughts and lead to an internship at MAD Magazine in college, and later to his breaking in as a cartoonist for The New Yorker. Forming lasting connections with friends and loved ones, however, remains complicated. Eventually, a combination of Exposure and Response Prevention Therapy and medication seems to provide him peace and hope for the future. VERDICT Katzenstein is witty and fearlessly honest. The rapid pace at which his story unfolds can be a little disorienting at times, but ultimately it proves the right choice for conveying the experience of his daily life.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2020
A cartoonist's graphic memoir of OCD. Though he had previously dealt with obsessive routines, Katzenstein traces his full-blown OCD to his parents' divorce, when "cracks form[ed] in my world, little gaps between what should be and what [wa]s. The cracks ma[d]e me furious. Everything ma[d]e me furious." From that childhood explanation, the author spins a narrative of being trapped within a personal hell, one that makes it difficult to connect with other people, leaves him hiding, and occasionally renders him unable to get out of bed. As a germophobe, he can never shower or wash his hands enough. As an adolescent, he realized that he had "a diagnosed mental illness," he writes, "and even as I begin to understand my strange behaviors as compulsions, I keep behaving compulsively." Yet life continued. Katzenstein went to college, fell in love, and found solace in "a steady diet of partying, drinking too much, reveling in an insane myopia." The author continued to draw and was ecstatic when, after much rejection, one of his cartoons was accepted by the New Yorker. It "was the single coolest moment of my career," one that felt so good that he initially expected all of his problems to go away. They didn't, of course. Katzenstein tried a variety of therapies (cognitive et al.), and he improved in fits and starts. But he has always worried that his creativity and OCD are inextricably linked. Interspersed throughout are illustrations of Sisyphus pushing the bolder up the hill, occasionally in danger of being crushed by it. There are also some astonishing drawings of how it feels to have his brain blowing apart from within, which contrast with others showing his attempts to keep things under control. As he notes, he is "an anxious cartoonist," and this is his story. Enlightening words and drawings show how it can feel inside when outside life appears to be just fine.

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June 1, 2020
A scary statue in his grandparents' house, a reoccurring nightmare, suddenly feeling dirty, even contaminated, and washing his hands all the time: these are just the beginning phases of Katzenstein's obsessive-compulsive disorder. In this graphic memoir filled with expressive, large-scale black-and-white sketches, the cartoonist not only documents the onset of this mental illness but also explains how obsessions and compulsions loop together repeatedly in his mind. As OCD overtakes his teenage and college years, affecting friendships and romances, and his parents' divorce adds more cracks to a shattered life, Katzenstein describes how art became a means of controlling his thoughts. After finding initial success with Mad Magazine and as a cartoonist for the New Yorker, he develops panic attacks that leave him bedridden. In a soul-searching path to recovery, he questions the relationships between his anxiety and creativity. While the cartoonist's new order to his life and art is hopeful, his sporadic illustrations of himself as a modern Sisyphus also remind that OCD is a lifelong struggle. Readers will champion Katzenstein's fight.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)