Stitched: A Memoir

My birthday was 19 days ago. I didn't make any big deal of it on the blog this year. I'm not sure why. I just didn't. I let the day pass without any comment on here.

Anyways, my boyfriend bought me a DVD copy of the "Painful Secrets" movie (a.k.a. "Secret Cutting) and Marissa Carney's book "Stitched: A Memoir." It's somewhat weird that my boyfriend would buy me two things that were related to cutting. Of course, he doesn't want me to cut, but I think he thought they'd help me with my goal of facing all my issues and eventually overcoming them.

I haven't even opened the DVD yet. As I posted a while back, I watched the movie a while back online and it triggered my desire to cut pretty bad. So I'm going to wait to open it until I'm in a more stable place.

I started reading the book right away, though. I stopped reading the book I was reading and picked the new one up. It's a very unique book. It's a collection of Marissa's personal journal entries and her poetry mixed with present-day commentary looking back at the journal entries. I just finished it about 30 minutes ago. In the end, I think it was a very helpful book for me to read. It gave some really good insight into another cutter's mind.

There are a lot of similarities between Marissa and I... she's only 4 years older than me, she's also a journalist, she has had lifelong struggles with her father, she has a good but strained relationship with her mother and a brother, she has a strong belief in God. She mentions reading the books "Girl Interrupted" and "Prozac Nation" and watching the movie "Thirteen." Those are three things that have been really helpful for me in the past.

I definitely would recommend the book to anyone who is a cutter or a former cutter or anyone who wants to understand why someone else cuts.

I normally would include passages that stood out to me from the book, but I'd be quoting about a third of the book. That's way more typing that I care to do right now

I do have some critics though... 1) While I love the book's cover, I could see it be very triggering to someone who gets triggered by images of self-harm. The painting has a bunch of cuts on the woman's arms. That is a little hard to stomach when you're struggling with the desire to cut yourself. ... 2) Because the majority of the book is taken straight out of Marissa's journals, sometimes it's hard to follow. She sort of jumps around a lot, and many of the entries don't give details of what she's reflecting on. Occasionally I felt lost while reading it, but of course, that sort of drives home the point of her instability while writing ... 3) There were some typos throughout the book, so it wasn't edited as well as it should have been, and the book uses several different fonts. The book's dedication has a font that is hard to read, and each poem has its own font that is different than the journal entries. For some reason that bothers me a lot.

Anyways... I am really happy my boyfriend discovered the book on Amazon and bought it for me. If you've read it, please share your thoughts with me through a comment. I'd love to hear what everyone else thought of the book.