The Woman Who Thought Too Much

No, it wasn't me.  Although I have often been told I think too much, it was Joanne Limburg, who has written her memoir and given it this title.

The book is about her life as a poet with OCD and she describes her journey with the 'disease'.    On the last page of the book, she writes; but then, as I've said, no one expects normality from a poet. 

As someone who is "a little bit OCD" as comic Jon Richardson famously described himself, (see: www.channel4.com/programmes/jon-richardson-a-little-bit-ocd)  I found the memoir very interesting and, I thank God (or whoever), that I have been spared its full trauma.

As part of Joanne's research for the book, she spoke to a leading psychiatrist who suggested that what underlies such crippling perfectionism is the need for that 'just right' feeling that drives all kinds of compulsions from hand washing and oven checking through to counting and word repetition, in which sufferers may use emotional criteria that you don't finish something until it feels right, rather than taking the objective view.

Towards the end of the book she writes; the trouble with writing.....is that you fear in advance - or rather, you know in advance - that whatever comes out on the page is bound to fall short of the fuzzily luminous piece of perfection that you plan to write beforehand.

She goes onto say; one of the necessary conditions of creativity is the ability to bear the disillusionment which an encounter with one's realworld, unidealized products inevitably brings.

However, as she notes, the making of poems can be an ingenious attempt at self-cure, a kind of symbolic healing.  She says the formal working-through of the poem on the page brings about a corresponding working-through of a problem in the psyche.  Difficulties with emotion and experience are transformed on the page into difficulties with form, and as you find a solution to these, an acceptable compromise between the experience or thought you are trying to express and the means available to express it, there is a sense of real physical and emotional release.

In the book she includes the poem The Return about the death of her father.  As one who has also lost her father, I thought it was wonderful and very moving.   Also see Inner Bloke on her webpage.

I have ordered a copy of her book of poems; Femenismo.

See: www.joannelimburg.net/