WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 63Review_FICTION
of the rich form the backbone of best-
seller Contreras’s juicy if overdramatic
romance. College senior Amelia Bastón,
a student journalist newly transferred
to her affluent father’s alma mater, Ellis
University (a fictionalized Cornell),
investigates the disappearance of fellow
student Lana Ly, which she believes may
be related to the mysterious accident
that left her brother in a coma. Amelia
acquiesces to the romantic attention of
her brother’s best friend, hockey player
Logan Fitzgerald, despite implications
that he was somehow involved in Lana’s
vanishing. As Amelia’s investigation,
and her relationship with Logan, draw
her ever closer to the campus’s sinister
secret societies, Contreras’s character-
izations of the privileged college
students fall into shallow caricature.
Though the setting is deliciously glam-
orous and tense hazing scenes evoke a
palpable sense of anxiety, the mystery is
haphazard and Amelia’s internal life
never quite coalesces on the page.
Contreras (The Consequence of Falling)
lets readers see pieces of the mystery
long before Amelia realizes them herself,
undermining her supposed deductive
skills. This soapy suspense novel is
longer on style than substance. (Self-
published)
Comics
★ Everything Is an Emergency:
An OCD Story in Words and
Pictures
Jason Adam Katzenstein. HarperPerennial,
$19.99 (256 pages) ISBN 978-0-06-295007-9
In this candid examination of life with
obsessive-compulsive disorder, New
Yorker cartoonist Katzenstein draws his
brain as a broken record. “Your hands are
dirty. Scrtchh. Your hands are dirty.
Scrtchh. Your hands—.” Katzenstein
succinctly conveys what it feels like to
be trapped in a mental loop dominated
by panic, guilt, and fears of “contamina-
tion.” Sometimes he’s a sweaty Sisyphus,
mentally pushing a boulder up a hill
even as he builds a relatively happy life
in New York City; sometimes he’s
swirling in an isolation, unable to get
out of bed. For years, Katzenstein has
managed day-to-day with the mantra—
What tone did you want to strike in
this book?
Jokes disarm us. I want laughter to be
a way into talking about the stuff that
is scarier or less comfortable for me to
divulge. I’m kind of a silly person
wandering through this world, trying
to the best of my ability to convey
what’s in my brain.What scene was the
hardest to share?
It wasn’t my favorite thing
to draw the story of
throwing away my
underwear in college.
OCD is, for a lot of
people, easy to keep to
yourself. Divulging some
of these loops that were
going in my brain,
they’re quite embar-
rassing. The “pure O”
stuff—the nightmarish
thoughts—they’re often crossed out
and darkened in the book. There’s
this double-bind hold that “pure
obsession” has over people with OCD,
which is that if you have a terrible
thought, then you have the meta-
thoughts of “What kind of person
would think this?” and “If anybody
knew that you thought this, they
wouldn’t want to be close to you.”
OCD at its worst is very isolating.Were there times when you thought,
“I can’t believe I’m putting this down
on paper”?
There were a few. But, even though
I’m trying to be honest and vulner-
able, I have lines that I don’t cross,places I don’t want to go, things that I
don’t feel like I’m equipped enough at
this point to talk about. I love Basquiat’s
paintings, and how you can see his
process, where he would strike things
out so they are half-seen; that’s the
same for this book, and it feels intimate
to me.Is there anything
you’re worried about
being misunder-
stood or misread?
I worry that people
might consider me
to be an authority on
anything—I am an
authority on licking
a doorknob when
I’m on ecstasy. I’m
an authority on Mad
magazine trivia from
the 1960s. But if you
want to know how to
lead a healthy life and make art, please
take what you need and leave the rest.You talk about learning and loving to
draw as a teenager—do you feel like
OCD makes you draw more?
Some of what galvanizes me to make
art is that I can be in control, create
worlds, and solve visual puzzles. I was
afraid that when I started doing expo-
sure therapy, going to group, and
taking Zoloft, it would be a deterrent
to my creative life. But instead, I
made this book, which is the hardest
I’ve ever worked on anything. It’s a
240-page refutation of the notion that
you need to suffer to make art.
—Sarah Mirk[Q&A]
PW Talks with Jason Adam Katzenstein
Jokes on Repeat
Katzenstein, who honed his style with pithy one-panel New Yorker gags,
delves deeper into his obsessions in Everything Is an Emergency: An OCD
Story in Words and Pictures (HarperCollins, June; reviewed on this page).© lauren roche and victor llorente