Turtles All the Way Down

2.5—From where I sit, the primary accomplishment of Turtles All the Way Down is its depiction of mental illness. John Green doesn't romanticize mental illness. Turtles All the Way Down is a book about how mental illness sucks.

Living with mental illness is hard. Living with and caring about those living with mental illness is also hard. I like how Green writes characters that try and fail to understand what life is like for Aza. I like that those characters support Aza anyway. I also like that their support and concern does not cure Aza.

Mental illness is trivialized and stigmatized. For example, people dealing with anxiety might be pressured to “push through” their symptoms to make others happy, to show “how much they really care.” People say you shouldn't let mental illness control or confine you, that at the end of the day, your life is what you choose to make of it. These sentiments might seem encouraging, but at their core serve only to invalidate and shame people struggling with their health.

Aza sees how her illness impacts her relationships. She wants to change, to be able to stop, to be able to not. But you can't will your symptoms away. And in moments where Aza works to be better to family and friends, Green takes care not to paint her efforts as some volitional conquest of her ever spiraling inner monologue. I appreciated that.

The rest of the book...well, I'll be honest, I'm not sure how much substance there is outside of that. The few plot points that were there are pretty ridiculous, especially in retrospect.

It's a John Green book, and the more books of his I read, the more I feel like when you've read one, you've read them all. My main takeaway was an interpretation of mental illness and specifically anxiety that was, for me, uncomfortably accurate.