OCTOBER 2018 - AudioFile
Brittany Pressley does a justifiable narration of Amanda Stern’s memoir of living with panic disorder. Pressley’s gentle, friendly vocal disposition is fitting to tell Stern’s story. Pressley has a certain clearness and purity in her interpretation; she expresses each anxious thought powerfully, guiding the listener to understand its complexity and debilitating effects. Adjusting her tone for each panic-stricken moment, she sounds authentically hysterical, fearful, or agitated. Stern’s struggle with handling her extreme anxiety on her own while hiding it from others and seeking a diagnosis is fascinating and relatable. Her ability to express distressing thoughts and the unique way she views the world can be surprisingly humorous. D.Z. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
The New York Times Book Review - Ariel Leve
…[a] resonant and often funny memoir…While the supposed tension of the book rests on a discovery—the diagnosis Stern finally receives—the real tension lies in how and whether she will evolve in spite of it.
Publishers Weekly
★ 03/26/2018
Stern (The Long Haul) courageously lays open her excruciating experience with 25 years of untreated panic disorder in this brave memoir of mental illness. From the time she was a small child growing up in New York City, Stern found terrifying possibilities in everything—what would happen if she lost her mother or she herself was kidnapped, what if her family lost their house, what if the constant testing of her intelligence revealed what she suspects. that she is different from all other children. She is eight years old at the time her worst fears are made real in 1979, when six-year-old Etan Patz—who lived mere blocks from her family’s Greenwich Village rowhouse on MacDougal Street— disappears without a trace, and Stern’s close friend Melissa dies of a brain tumor. Before she found her considerable talents in the theater and in writing, Stern tried coping through unhealthy behaviors, including an increasing dependence on cocaine. Failed relationships further reinforced Stern’s feeling that there was something broken inside her, along with the heartbreaking belief that her constant worrying kept those she loved safe from harm. Readers who have had panic attacks or have experience with a similar disorder will instantly relate to Stern’s experiences; those who do not will come to understand the disease’s terrifying power—and the utter relief that comes when it is finally identified and treated. Honest and deeply felt, Stern’s story delivers a raw window into the terrifying world of panic disorders. (June)
From the Publisher
"...Stern's bold work is told with insight and humor..."—Real Simple, Great Books to Help You Relax and De-Stress
There's something magnetic about Little Panic.—Goop
"In this canny, insightful, novelistic memoir, Amanda Stern traces the indelible path her underlying anxiety has traced in a rich but often frustrated life. It's a book about her emergence into and acceptance of mature identity, but it is also about the danger of love, the maze of social pressure, and the tension between childhood expectations and adult realities. Narrating with real poignance how every experience she's had has been filtered through her psychic vulnerability, she achieves a symphony of complex fragilities and redeeming strengths."—Andrew Solomon, National Book Award-winning author of Far From the Tree
"Amanda Stern has written an affecting, emotionally vivid memoir that really succeeds in giving the reader the sense of what it might be like to be another person, with all the experiences and sensations-including the most difficult ones-that that entails. Her book is reflective, authentic, alive."—Meg Wolitzer, New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion
"Little Panic is an intimate and sweeping story of hyper-vigilance. Cheeky and vivid and transporting, it's also extremely funny. Stern's book conveys just how isolating mental illness really is, how it creates almost a second existence for those who suffer it. As I read it I had the sense of someone living underwater, watching the world going on effortlessly above. I was swept up. I spend my life hoping to find books like this."—Sarah Manguso, author of 300 Arguments: Essays
"With courage and a keen sense of humor, Little Panic delves beneath the surface of the terms, tests, and judgements we apply to our mental existence in order to recover the experiential richness buried beneath. Readers will recognize themselves in Stern's psychological coming-of-age, keenly empathetic and vibrantly felt."—Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
"Brave, in the truest sense of the word, Amanda Stern's Little Panic is a document of survival of the fittest. This is the book for anyone-who has dropped a beat, a week or a year, feeling afraid not just of the dark, but of life, of being left alone in this world. A haunting story of the impact of time and place-the backdrop of Etan Patz's vanishing, New York in the 1970s-split between parents and worlds, struggling to find a place of her own. Little Panic is a stunning reminder of what it is to be human."—A. M. Homes, bestselling author of The Mistress's Daughter and Days of Awe
"Amanda Stern sees childhood with perfect clarity, and she sees how we, as adults, are still living in childhood. Little Panic will make you feel alot. Without a doubt, it is a masterpiece."—Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life
"Stern has succeeded in writing an often-funny tale about mental illness....A good reminder that all people, including those who "learn differently," need empathy and human connection."—Booklist
"Moving...vivid and illuminating."—BBC, "Ten Books to Read in June"
"Stern's frank, funny memoir about living with anxiety...will have chronic worrywarts laugh-crying with recognition."—O, The Oprah Magazine
"Brave, fiercely funny...a brilliant read that offers hope for anyone burdened by anxiety. "—People Magazine
"Visceral, pulsating realness. Alternating between past and present, Amanda details the growing anxiety of America through her own experience while weaving in a richly portrayed, fascinating portrait of New York's bohemian Greenwich Village scene of the 1970s and '80s. If you suffer from anxiety or are simply curious about the experience, it's a must-read."—MIND BODY GREEN, 5 BOOKS YOU WONT BE ABLE TO PUT DOWN THIS JULY
"Amanda Stern paints a painfully honest and heartbreaking picture of her life living with an anxiety disorder....LITTLE PANIC will make you feel less alone."—Hello Giggles
"Resonant and often funny."—New York Times Book Review
"Entertaining and sad and funny and relatable....LITTLE PANIC grips and discomfits in the best way."—Salon
"We haven't heard this story before, and with about 1 in 5 children diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and about and 1 in 4 adults, this is a story that needs to be heard."—Psychology Today
OCTOBER 2018 - AudioFile
Brittany Pressley does a justifiable narration of Amanda Stern’s memoir of living with panic disorder. Pressley’s gentle, friendly vocal disposition is fitting to tell Stern’s story. Pressley has a certain clearness and purity in her interpretation; she expresses each anxious thought powerfully, guiding the listener to understand its complexity and debilitating effects. Adjusting her tone for each panic-stricken moment, she sounds authentically hysterical, fearful, or agitated. Stern’s struggle with handling her extreme anxiety on her own while hiding it from others and seeking a diagnosis is fascinating and relatable. Her ability to express distressing thoughts and the unique way she views the world can be surprisingly humorous. D.Z. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2018-04-04
Stern (The Long Haul, 2003) offers a searing memoir about her lifelong panic disorder.In a series of mostly brief chapters, most of which could function as stand-alone mini-essays, the author proves, as other memoirists have before her, that looking away from a train wreck can be nearly impossible. The riveting story is mostly chronological, as Stern deals with her daily fears up to age 25, the age when a therapist finally provided the proper medical term for her outsized anxieties. "The matter-of-factness with which [the therapist has] said all these life-altering things astonishes me," she writes of that revelation. "I've spent my entire life battling some impossible, invisible plague no one ever seemed to see, and this guy did it with such ease, as though panic disorder is easy to establish, obvious to anyone who would take the time to ask what my symptoms were; textbook, even." At times, the author jumps ahead to the current decade, as she approaches 50. In her recent years, she has been thinking seriously about becoming a mother. As a result, she explores the science of freezing her eggs until she can identify a suitable sperm donor. Eventually, she decided that the move would be too risky. With a loving mother, a compassionate stepfather, stable siblings, admirable schoolteachers, and at least a couple of competent therapists, the author seemingly faced good odds of shedding her panic disorder and resulting anxieties. However, as she shows, she has had to battle anxieties nearly every day, with occasional patches of worry-free hours. In one of the chapters, Stern shares with readers a day-by-day account of a full week, conveying what it is like inside her head. At the end of selected chapters, the author includes actual paragraphs from the reports of multiple therapists she consulted, sometimes willingly, sometimes under duress.Stern is such a skilled stylist—and such an unforgiving judge of herself—that the memoir radiates a morbid fascination.
