A raw, affecting memoir about striving for acceptance with borderline personality disorder
Pippa Scott knew she was different from an early age, but she was made to believe that different was also “difficult.” With a strong personality and even stronger emotions, she seemed to feel things more than those around her, which would set a precedent for the rest of her life.
As a child, her anxiety, mixed with being highly sensitive, gave way to crying and screaming fits on a regular basis. The reader learns early on how emotionally incapable Pippa’s family was in handling these tendencies; she regularly encounters a feeling of rejection from those meant to always love her. This all comes to a head when her parents decide she would be better suited to boarding school.
It is at this school where Pippa’s story truly begins to take shape. Afflicted with a not yet diagnosed Borderline Personality Disorder, Pippa searches for belonging through attention from the opposite sex. This often results in risky behavior and further self-destruction. The reader follows her as she repeatedly puts herself, not to mention her emotional well-being, in harm’s way. From romantically pursuing a boy who sent her death threats to trying to force a gay man to love her, there is a good deal of self-destruction at play.
This memoir makes you want to give a hug to Pippa through the pages, but it allows us to have a great deal of empathy for those in Pippa’s life too. She herself admits she is manipulative when she does not receive the love she craves, from pretending to have dizzy spells to even faking a stint in the hospital. Her honesty about these behaviors is both refreshing and a bit infuriating.
The most compelling part of this memoir is perhaps the least explored, which is Pippa’s relationship with her own children and how that compares to her childhood. Her understandable anxiety surrounding her son’s health issues and her helplessness when her daughter exhibits similar behavior to hers is absolutely heartbreaking. However, she shies away from fully addressing this aspect of her life, opting to take a deeper dive into her relationships, including a slightly confusing one with an older, commitment-phobic man who is also her roommate. While the reader is given in-depth access to her toxic relationships, the loose ends regarding her ex-husband and children are not exactly tied up.
Pippa Scott is a strong writer with a firm hand, adept at painting vivid pictures of settings and situations. She’s earnest and real, stopping at nothing to explore her desire to satisfy her lovers in whichever way she can. Readers can’t help but cringe with her, in the best way, even if sometimes we do it in frustration. She is vulnerable and shows real growth on the page—something every reader can applaud.
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