Turtles All the Way Down

Aza Holmes is sixteen, lives in Indianapolis, and has OCD — not the TV version that makes you quirky and observational, but the real version: intrusive thoughts that spiral without end, compulsive behaviors that manage but never stop them, the specific experience of watching your own life from inside a glass cage while your mind refuses to be quiet. Green has lived with OCD most of his life and wrote this novel to give it form — to say to teenagers who feel completely alone in their thought spirals that this thing has a name, that other people have it, that it is not a personal failure and not a stage to outgrow. The novel deliberately refuses the therapeutic plot — Aza does not defeat her OCD, she learns to live with it and still have a life worth living. That refusal is the most honest thing in the book and the most important message for any teenager who has been told that mental illness is something to get over. New York Times #1 bestseller. Own voices.