Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind

Title: Today I'm Alice
Author: Alice Jamieson
Genre: Autobiography, Non-Fiction
Published: 2009
Rating: ★★★★










The reasons for which I have chosen this book, a non-fiction, rather out of date piece of writing, is still unclear to me. It would hardly  be any sane-reviewer's first choice for their first post of their new blog - but that's okay because, after reading this book a few weeks ago, I don't mind being seen as insane.

Today I'm Alice is an autobiography about a girl, Alice Jamieson, who is continually raped by her father during her childhood and adolescent years and as a result in the years to follow suffers from depression, anorexia, alcohol addiction, drug addiction and Multiple Personality Disorder.

Although the accounts and descriptions given in this book are shocking, and, frankly heart-breaking, Alice's journey is inspiring and the explanations she gives about her Multiple Personality Disorder (as she researches it herself once she is diagnosed) is intriguing.
If you are someone who is perhaps interested in Psychology or how the human mind copes with trauma and stress (such as I) , then I certainly can't recommend this book enough.

What I liked about the style and writing in this book was that it was mainly objective and informative. It didn't seem as if she was attempting to turn her story into a dramatic TV series, milking the fact that she deserves pity, or that she has any self-pity of her own. Her aim, and she makes this clear at the beginning of her book, is to bring hope and courage to those who are being abused and to create awareness particularly about rape.

The only thing that I found rather annoying was that there were a few spelling errors, one being in the first sentence of the book. Those type of things make me want to phone the author up and ask them very politely if they were ever in contact with an editor. Although I understand that Alice did not write the book, she gave her accounts and memoirs to someone else who wrote it.

This is a must-read for anyone who is looking for something different and eye-opening. Once I finished the last page of Today I'm Alice, I was left with a sinking feeling of disappointment in humanity, yet a shining glimmer of hope and pride in it, too.