Chosen Books: _Amen, Amen, Amen_

Reading Abby Sher’s memoir Amen, Amen, Amen often feels like watching an M. Night Shyamalan movie—a haunting magical power forever looming just below the surface. She chronicles a bout with mental illness that makes it feel like she is responsible for offing who and whatever gets in her path: “I trampled baby birds, poisoned squirrels, and sent a lady in a down vest running into the street by Tony’s Nursery so she could be plowed down by a minivan. Another day it was a Hispanic boy wearing a Walkman.” After her beloved aunt Simone suddenly dies when Sher is ten years old, and soon after, her charismatic and loving father, she is convinced that their deaths are the result of a religious transgression of her own devices.

Sher describes a pattern of mental illness that goes back as long as she can remember, but its symptoms reach a crescendo with her father’s death. Tormented by horrific visions of strangers and friends suddenly dying before her eyes, she feels compelled to adopt a series of quasi-religious behaviors like kissing pictures or her bicycle over and over, and speaking to God—praying obsessively hours a day. She snatches up loose paperclips and tacks because in her warped perspective they might somehow make for death-inducing weapons (“even the smallest piece of metal or plastic could spear the most resilient tire”). She also washes her hands raw.

Amen, Amen, Amen: Memoir of a Girl Who Couldn’t Stop Praying (Among Other Things) is a story of mental illness, and its refractions in her relationships with family members, friends and lovers. Although filled with turmoil, it’s easy to see why, as an adult, Sher would turn to comedy writing, improv and theater. A quirky thread winds its way through this heart-wrenching and thoroughly candid story. Take for instance when Sher asks her mother to play the Nabisco theme song at her own funeral one day, but “just the part at the very end where they sang Na-bis-co! and then a bell dinged” or her penchant for belting out the “Cement Mixer Song” (created with her father and inspired by a lot near their home filled with polka-dotted cement mixers) to block out her overwhelming belief that she was somehow a “subliminal serial killer.”

Sher’s troubles remain guarded in deep secrecy. Furious at a therapist who relentlessly questions her as a teenager, Sher writes of wanting “to go outside and tip the entire street into my mouth and swallow up every last pin until my insides were shredded.” Things escalate in her 20s when she becomes involved in a series of destructive relationships while also facing the increasing pressure of forging a successful career at Second City in Chicago. She begins to starve herself, working out four hours a day and chewing sugarless gum until her teeth are “stained a slick wintergreen.” Even as she falls in love with a stable man (her future husband) she turns to self-mutilation, including cutting and beating herself as a form of punishment and elixir: “Powerful blows to the back of my skull, counting them out in groups of five, twenty-five, fifty. If I could get in two hundred and fifty in one sitting, then I usually achieved a respectable buzz….”

Of course, Sher could not have written this book had she not overcome her struggle with mental illness. But this skillful writer has given us more than just her story of survival. Above all, Amen, Amen, Amen is an inspirational telling of surrender, loss, and love, leaving you wanting more from this fresh voice.

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