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Kissing Doorknobs
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Hesser, Terry Spencer. 1998. KISSING DOORKNOBS. New York: Delacorte Press. ISBN: 0-385-32329-8.

KISSING DOORKNOBS is the story of Tara, an eleven-year-old girl with obsessive-compulsive disorder.  Tara has been continually misdiagnosed by various professionals according to what symptoms they can see.  For example, when Tara begins taking apart all of her food and lining up her rice, she is diagnosed as anorexic.  When she can’t pay attention due to her need to give her attention to her compulsions, she is diagnosed as Attention Deficit Disorder.

 

Tara’s compulsions started before she was in kindergarten with compulsive scratching and extreme separation anxiety.  Tara says, “Each time she dropped me off I doubted I’d ever see her again.  I doubted she would be safe until she picked me up.  And I doubted the rest of our family could survive without her.”  She conveys the real fears a five-year-old might have, but magnified a great deal.

 

As Tara gets older, her parents ignore her illness, her father passing it off as “a stage.”  Things escalate for Tara when she begins to pray out loud every time someone curses or “takes the Lord’s name in vain.”  This increases the family tension to a new level.  After trying to ignore the problem for so long, Tara’s mother cannot handle the praying.  Both Tara and her mother begin to show signs of exhaustion as they walk the fine line of their relationship. 

 

When Tara begins to have to count the cracks in the sidewalk, her friends start to drift away.  She becomes incredibly angry if she is interrupted and though her friends want to help her, they feel like they are being pushed away.  When Tara moves on to having to “kiss the doorknob” thirty-three times before going through the door, her father begins to break down as well.  The reader can feel the strain this situation has put on the family; especially Tara.  She doesn’t want to do these things; they don’t make her feel good; she just has to do them.  The author does an excellent job of making the reader understand the pull behind the compulsion.

 

Tara is finally diagnosed correctly and introduced to a boy named Sam who also has OCD.  With the help of Sam and with confrontational therapy, Tara begins to get her compulsions under control.  Later, Sam has a relapse and the reader understands that this is something that Tara will have to fight every day of her life.  Tara is lucky to have friends who are willing to try to help her and stick by her, and it is easy to see how people with OCD could easily become isolated.

 

The author explains that this book is not an autobiography, but shares that it is based on her own struggles with OCD.  The text is followed by an afterword by Dr. A.J. Allen, director of the Pediatric OCD & Tic Disorders Clinic at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  Dr. Allen tells more about the specifics of Obsessive-compulsive disorder and lists some resources on the topic.