“Multiple Choice” is the story of Monica Devon, a teenage girl with an obsessive compulsive disorder that has not yet been diagnosed. She lives her life in a perpetual state of fear, worried that she’s going to say or do the wrong thing, rehashing everything that has happened and wondering what she could have done to make the outcome different, and blaming herself when things do go wrong. Her friends and family know that she is a little bit obsessive, but none of them realize to what extent she’s struggling.
Monica is also somewhat of a genius when it comes to word games, such as finding anagrams. Sometimes she can distract herself from her obsessing by playing word games, all of which she does in her head, but at other times, doing the word games is one of her compulsions.
Monica knows she’s out of control, but she doesn’t have any idea what to do about it. In a desperate attempt to find any way out, she invents a game she calls “multiple choice.” She puts the A, B, C, and D tiles from her Scrabble game in her pocket, and whenever she starts to worry how she should act in a given situation, she comes up with four different behaviors or actions and assigns them each a letter. Whatever tile she pulls out, that’s what she’ll do. Sometimes her choices are ridiculous, and sometimes they’re charitable. But regardless, she feels a sense of freedom – the decision is no longer hers to make. She doesn’t have to figure it out for herself – the tiles tell her what to do.
However, playing the game soon becomes an obsession, and she does some foolish and hurtful things. She loses her best friend over one choice, and the little boy she babysits suffers a bad accident because of another. Finally someone notices that she’s barely hanging on by the thread and gets her the treatment she needs, allowing her to move forward without constant fear.
I found this book very enlightening. So many people suffer from an OCD, and we need to realize what it’s like for them to have a strong compulsion to do something, almost to the point where they think they’ll die if they don’t. Reading about Monica helped me to understand what that feels like and some of the internal desperation that goes along with having this disorder. I recommend this book for your young adult reader, but you will appreciate it too.
(This book was published in 1999 by Scholastic.)
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