Little panic : dispatches from an anxious life / Amanda Stern.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In the vein of bestselling memoirs about mental illness like Andrew Solomon's Noonday Demon , Sarah Hepola's Blackout, and Daniel Smith's Monkey Mind comes a gorgeously immersive, immediately relatable, and brilliantly funny memoir about living life on the razor's edge of panic.

The world never made any sense to Amanda Stern--how could she trust time to keep flowing, the sun to rise, gravity to hold her feet to the ground, or even her own body to work the way it was supposed to? Deep down, she knows that there's something horribly wrong with her, some defect that her siblings and friends don't have to cope with.
Growing up in the 1970s and 80s in New York, Amanda experiences the magic and madness of life through the filter of unrelenting panic. Plagued with fear that her friends and family will be taken from her if she's not watching-that her mother will die, or forget she has children and just move away-Amanda treats every parting as her last. Shuttled between a barefoot bohemian life with her mother in Greenwich Village, and a sanitized, stricter world of affluence uptown with her father, Amanda has little she can depend on. And when Etan Patz disappears down the block from their MacDougal Street home, she can't help but believe that all her worst fears are about to come true.
Tenderly delivered and expertly structured, Amanda Stern's memoir is a document of the transformation of New York City and a deep, personal, and comedic account of the trials and errors of seeing life through a very unusual lens.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Author's Note on Sources (p. ix)
• I Am Not a Clock (p. 1)
• Not the Right Kind of Human (p. 7)
• Maybe I Am Not a Person (p. 11)
• How to Say What's Wrong (p. 19)
• The System of the World (p. 37)
• Countdown to Karen Silkwood (p. 41)
• The Underside of Perfect (p. 57)
• My Real Family (p. 65)
• Not-Melissa (p. 75)
• Someone Kicked the Earth (p. 83)
• If Time Were a Dog (p. 94)
• Oh How We Glowed (p. 99)
• Scapegoat (p. 115)
• Frankie Bird (p. 120)
• Jinx (p. 129)
• Yes, No, Maybe, I Don't Know (p. 142)
• Listen Carefully and Say Exactly What I Say (p. 148)
• Normal-Sized (p. 155)
• A Beautiful Gorgeous Life (p. 160)
• A Stay-Behind Kid (p. 165)
• The Bright Side (p. 170)
• The Drainpipe Man (p. 177)
• A Word Never Means Only One Thing (p. 188)
• A Sense of Rightness (p. 199)
• Hunky Dory (p. 220)
• My Life Stained the World (p. 231)
• I'm the Test to Solve (p. 243)
• Everywhere I Look, Families (p. 262)
• Anarchy (p. 269)
• When I Turn Eighteen (p. 282)
• What If I Give Birth to Myself? (p. 292)
• Who Doesn't Want to Be in a Play? (p. 297)
• One Right Way to Be a Person (p. 305)
• Homeless (p. 312)
• I Am a Pinball Machine (p. 317)
• The System Is the Problem (p. 322)
• The Dread, the Relief (p. 336)
• Waiting to Move On (p. 340)
• The Body (p. 345)
• Waited My Whole Life to Be Normal (p. 357)
• Forever Mama (p. 366)
• Take Care of the Animals (p. 373)
• Certainty (p. 377)
• To Be the Same (p. 381)
• Acknowledgments (p. 387)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Novelist (The Long Haul) and middle-grade author ("Frankly Frannie" series) Stern outlines her childhood and adolescence with a series of vignettes that slowly unravel her anxious life in New York City. She intertwines conversations with neighbors, friends, and teachers with doctors' appointments and notes in her medical files. The tension only increases when a child is abducted a mere few blocks from her home. A tense home life and lack of mental health awareness creates frustration. The author's acute attention to detail and conversational tone will capture readers' attention, as she gives voice to young people who might also be struggling with similar situations and could learn from the challenges she faced. VERDICT This accessible personal narrative is for readers who have been touched by divorce, anxiety, or are looking for a new perspective through memories of -childhood.-Meghan Dowell, Beloit Coll., WI © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Stern (The Long Haul) courageously lays open her excruciating experience with 25 years of untreated panic disorder in this brave memoir of mental illness. From the time she was a small child growing up in New York City, Stern found terrifying possibilities in everything-what would happen if she lost her mother or she herself was kidnapped, what if her family lost their house, what if the constant testing of her intelligence revealed what she suspects. that she is different from all other children. She is eight years old at the time her worst fears are made real in 1979, when six-year-old Etan Patz-who lived mere blocks from her family's Greenwich Village rowhouse on MacDougal Street- disappears without a trace, and Stern's close friend Melissa dies of a brain tumor. Before she found her considerable talents in the theater and in writing, Stern tried coping through unhealthy behaviors, including an increasing dependence on cocaine. Failed relationships further reinforced Stern's feeling that there was something broken inside her, along with the heartbreaking belief that her constant worrying kept those she loved safe from harm. Readers who have had panic attacks or have experience with a similar disorder will instantly relate to Stern's experiences; those who do not will come to understand the disease's terrifying power-and the utter relief that comes when it is finally identified and treated. Honest and deeply felt, Stern's story delivers a raw window into the terrifying world of panic disorders. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Despite its title, this book is big. In 44 chapters with headings like Maybe I Am Not a Person, Stern writes about how anxiety shaped her life, and not for the better, beginning with her childhood, when she dreads leaving her beautiful, eccentric mom, who she believes needs her protection. Somehow, Stern has succeeded in writing an often-funny tale about mental illness. For example, she explains her belief that a local Mafia figure, Jimmy Alcatraz, keeps her Lower Manhattan neighborhood safe. Stern recounts how, though clearly intelligent, she performs poorly on traditional school tests, which causes problems with college admissions: I can't even get into what is other people's safety school. A guy stalks her; she chooses a bad boyfriend. Until she turns 25, she doesn't know what's wrong with her. Today, at 47, she realizes that left untreated, anxiety disorders, like fingernails, grow with a person. Don't expect a traditional happily-ever-after ending; but don't expect a gloomy one, either. Stern's story is a good reminder that all people, including those who learn differently, need empathy and human connection.--Springen, Karen Copyright 2018 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

Stern (The Long Haul, 2003) offers a searing memoir about her lifelong panic disorder.In a series of mostly brief chapters, most of which could function as stand-alone mini-essays, the author proves, as other memoirists have before her, that looking away from a train wreck can be nearly impossible. The riveting story is mostly chronological, as Stern deals with her daily fears up to age 25, the age when a therapist finally provided the proper medical term for her outsized anxieties. "The matter-of-factness with which [the therapist has] said all these life-altering things astonishes me," she writes of that revelation. "I've spent my entire life battling some impossible, invisible plague no one ever seemed to see, and this guy did it with such ease, as though panic disorder is easy to establish, obvious to anyone who would take the time to ask what my symptoms were; textbook, even." At times, the author jumps ahead to the current decade, as she approaches 50. In her recent years, she has been thinking seriously about becoming a mother. As a result, she explores the science of freezing her eggs until she can identify a suitable sperm donor. Eventually, she decided that the move would be too risky. With a loving mother, a compassionate stepfather, stable siblings, admirable schoolteachers, and at least a couple of competent therapists, the author seemingly faced good odds of shedding her panic disorder and resulting anxieties. However, as she shows, she has had to battle anxieties nearly every day, with occasional patches of worry-free hours. In one of the chapters, Stern shares with readers a day-by-day account of a full week, conveying what it is like inside her head. At the end of selected chapters, the author includes actual paragraphs from the reports of multiple therapists she consulted, sometimes willingly, sometimes under duress.Stern is such a skilled stylistand such an unforgiving judge of herselfthat the memoir radiates a morbid fascination. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.