"This book is a triumph"—Eliza Griswold, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Amity & Prosperity Pathological is smart and detailed investigative journalism meets stunning and sweeping personal memoir. It’s the true story of six diagnoses—anorexia, major depressive disorder (MDD), anxiety disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), bipolar disorder—writer and journalist Sarah Fay received over a twenty-five year period of her life. It's a deeply-researched investigation into the meaning of "diagnosis" itself, specifically the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Considered psychiatry’s “bible,” the DSM is the manual from which all mental illness diagnoses come. It took years for Sarah to find out….it’s fiction.  So many have their own stories to tell—of misdiagnosis and over-diagnosis and multiple (sometimes competing) diagnoses. And confusion. And anguish. And suffering. With knowledge comes the ability to walk into a physician’s office (or advise a friend or sibling or parent or child who’s just walked out of one) and understand what “clinical depression” or “anxiety disorder” or “bipolar disorder” or any DSM diagnosis really means. In this gripping debut memoir from former Paris Review editor and award-winning writer, Sarah uses a surprising literary device, a fresh and entertaining survey of the rules and history of punctuation, to illuminate how, like pathology, punctuation orders and categorizes, and tries to make sense of what’s otherwise disordered.