In college, Abby is diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, and while it helps explain the counting and kissing and collecting, she resists rationalizing her deepest obsession, certain that her prayers are not an illness but the cure. The prescribed patterns from which she cannot deviate become her shelter and her obsession. At first she repeats the few phrases she remembers from synagogue, but by the time she is in high school, Abby is spending hours locked in her closet urgently reciting a series of incantations and pleas. When her father and favorite aunt pass away, Abby fills the void of her loss with rituals: kissing her father's picture over and over each night, washing her hands and counting her steps, collecting sharp objects that she thinks could harm innocent pedestrians. Until the age of ten, comedian and writer Abby Sher was a happy child in a fun-loving, musical family.
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