Review of Torn Apart: The True Story of a Childhood Lost by James Patterson

This book was written with the cooperation of a father and son with James Patterson as an opportunity to present the story and experiences of a kid who spent his formative years struggling with the tics of Tourette's Syndrome, and the effects of the medications given in an effort to control it. The book is written in the voice of the patient (who gave permission to have it published, saying that if it could help others with conditions like his, it was worth having things normally kept private, published in paperback for the masses), presumably edited/aided by Patterson, and contains notes from Patterson and Friedman which complement and present the story.

It is later discovered that Cory Friedman has Tourette's combined with anxiety and OCD, all of which "feed into" one another. What to do about it is the hard part: after a number of false hopes and serious side effects with just about every psych medication that can be had, in his late teens, Cory ends up spiraling into a cycle of alcohol abuse, smoking, and bad companions, which is only broken by a successful stint in one of those wilderness boot camps for teens; the ticcing and compulsions are only successfully controlled long-term with the aid of an extended hospital stay in a specialized hospital for Tourette's sufferers, where he is taught cognitive behavioral therapy and a set of mental exercises which help relieve the anxiety and compulsions and at first eliminate, but later only greatly reduce the tics. The therapy is successful in the sense that it at last allows him for the first time in most of his existence to enjoy many of the activities of normal life without being a hazard to himself and others.

He lets it be known that much of his eventual success and the rare events of enjoyment in his life with Tourette's and medications with serious side effects was due to the opportunities offered to him by his parents, who kept a complete record of the ultimately unsuccessful medications and his behavior on them, were able to give him the opportunities to play baseball, football, etc., as well as the wilderness camp to dry out from alcohol and smoking, the specialized school where he caught up much of his missing classwork, the specialized hospital where he finally got the therapy that proved to be a success, and ultimately, the fight with the school system bureaucrats for his opportunity to be allowed to catch up to his classmates in junior year and eventually progress through high school on schedule. Not many parents are not only so "plugged in" but also sympathetic. The story ends on a positive note: Cory is not only finally free of tics and socially accepted, but also pursing a future career in internet marketing.

This is not a "typical James Patterson novel" in the sense of being a murder mystery/whodunnit; nobody gets killed, although the Tourette's and/or compulsions lead the narrator to do some things that almost do get people hurt or killed, though not with criminal intent. In fact, the end of the book contains a note explaining that James Patterson is seeking other people's accounts of personal struggles with conditions like this in real life. Perhaps this will be a new direction for Patterson's writing?