Monkey Mind

Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety by Daniel Smith, 212 pages

In his 2012 memoir, Smith offers a personal take on living with anxiety, describing how it feels to have an anxiety attack, how he's suffered, and how he's working through it today. It's an OK memoir in that it definitely gets the word out that there are others who have anxiety, but don't go here looking for inspiration on how to treat the condition. I enjoyed the humorous portions of the memoir, particularly his discussion of being a fact-checker at The Atlantic (a job he says is both uniquely suited and a horrible idea for sufferers of anxiety). However, at times, it felt a bit too cookie-cutter as memoirs go, and I wish it had been propped up with bit of research rather than personal comparisons to Kafka and Philip Roth.