When Lina's idyllic childhood descends into mental chaos in her teenage years, Lina resorts to recording her thoughts in diaries, online chats and emails to make sense of her anguish. Through Lina's heart-wrenching words, the reader steps into her broken inner world to experience first-hand the obsessions, irrationality, angst and ruthlessness of teenage borderline personality disorder. Emo Reality shines a light into the dark corners of adolescent mental illness, proving this disorder is not just a phase, and demonstrating its ravages not just upon an individual, but also upon a whole family.
Publisher's Weekly Booklife: "An unflinching novel-as-memoir, drawn from the experiences of the author's daughter, explores the experience of a girl with borderline personality disorder. Through fictionalized diary entries, online posts, and emails, the account is told in vivid detail as Lina contends with the thoughts consuming her. Exploring family dynamics, self-esteem issues, mood swings, and her feeling that 'the whole world was out to get me,' this memoir is insightful in explaining the workings of a mind controlled by mental illness, building to a welcome burst of hope and recovery. Lina is an angry girl whose 'false memories' cause her to nurture an irrational hatred of family and authority. Although intelligent, she sabotages her education to spite her parents. Although talented, she fluctuates between dreams of being a tattooist and an actress. In her delusions, she believes the cause of her lack of success is the father, who is often away on business. In truth, Lina and her sister, who also sinks into depression, have little guidance in their lives aside from him. Wrenching in its candidness, Lina's story is a stark exploration of mental illness, undiagnosed and unchecked. Readers will become immersed in Lina's reflections and understand what it is like for an individual and a family facing borderline personality disorder."
