Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood

It's hard to imagine a breezy, funny memoir about OCD and eating disorders, but that seems to be what Traig has written. This slender work is mostly a series of vignettes in the author's childhood plagued by scrupulosity, a religion-tinged variant on classic OCD. If you look too long at any of it, it's hideously sad – the author's starvation as she invents ever stricter kashrut variants, and growing alienation from everyone – but it's basically all played for laughs, without really connecting the dots between the episodes.

Funny and poignant, this honest book about obsession, family and overdoing religious ritual made me both laugh and think.