Becoming Anna

It would be easy to focus on the mental state of the author. That is what we are trained to do -- to look for some kind of aberrance, and if we think we find it, to start questioning everything someone called 'mentally ill' says. But this is not, nor is it intended to be, a typical memoir that crawls into the psyche of a person and focuses entirely on what is and isn't a symptom of something. Whether or not any given 'mental patient' in the book, including the author, is crazy, prone to exaggeration, or even criminal is beside the point. The real point of this book, a damning description of the direct experience and effects of an inept and cruel system and a remembrance of the people the author left behind when she left, is carried out all too realistically.I don't doubt this book's accuracy, because I have lived it. I had to check the details a few times, while reading, to make sure that the times and places were different than the times and places I was institutionalized. Before realizing they were different, I wondered if Anna was one of the other inmates of the hospitals I lived in. She could have been. I've known people like her.The children were the same assortment of children I knew in the system. The staff were the same assortment of staff. They said and did the same things. The same atrocities happened. Lest anyone think the things she described from the state hospital are unique to state hospitals, I experienced the same things, sometimes down to the nitty-gritty details, in private hospitals. These forms of abuse seem to transcend settings and people -- my background was very different, but I witnessed and experienced the same things.The portrayal of inmates was both accurate and interesting. When I remember institutions, I remember architecture. I remember what the buildings were structured like, where the doors and windows were, what the tiles and carpeting looked like, and the layout of the grounds. I rarely dare to remember anything else, and I am much less of a socially-oriented person than Michener is to begin with. Her portraits of other patients reminded me of people I had forgotten, and I admired her ability to sum people up in short, evocative descriptions.I also admired her ability to write this. I have been urged to write a book of my experiences, but despite the fact that the bulk of them happened seven years ago, the memory is still too painful for me to be emotionally capable of touching it with a pen. She writes with the rawness and realism of a person who has been there, and a person who has *just* been there. Perhaps, as some have suggested, a version written later in life would have been cleaner and more mature-looking, with fewer superlative adjectives, journeys into pity and self-pity, more reflective. But I think such a book would also lose something vital -- the sense of immediacy, and the accuracy of the emotional recall, the rawness. In doing that, it would lose another form of accuracy that distinguishe

Of course people don't believe Anna. Nobody wants to believe that this stuff can happen.But it does.Anna's story helped me to write my story down, and i'm sure it's helped alot of people in the same situation.She told the horrible, Ugly truth, that nobody wants to believe. She made a difference in this world by writing a wonderful book. THe ending wasn't weak, the ending showed her transtion from Tiffany to Anna, the amount of courage shown in this book was amazing. Anna J Michner is a name we will be seeing years from now.

I am so glad that I found and read this book before reading the negative reviews here. It is a wonderfully written book--it really surprised me to be reading something so well-written on the topic, in fact. This book is a rare gem in it's willingness to stand up to the system while being quite eloquent.I may be accused of "siding" here, but I feel there are perfectly good reasons for it. I too have pretended I was crazy to escape living with my mother and had my life engulfed by trying to make it to my eighteenth birthday in a home that didn't treat me like a human being. I personally related to many of Anna's descriptions of her frustrations. Many people do not want to acknowledge what really happens behind closed doors, the cycles that repeat themselves over and over again. The disbelieving reactions of readers, criticizing her for her attitude, enforce the culture that believed Anna's mother and trapped her in mental institutions. And to these reviewers, the reason doing laundry in the basement is a big deal is because her dad lived in the basement and repeatedly beat her in that spot. It would not have been feasible for Anna to write a book full of apologies to her readers, so she offers a succinct one for interpreting the tone of the book, noting that if she is going overboard in anger, it is for lack of what she could feel going through it. And such a story is so complicated that I think she handles the issue very well.If you haven't read this book, please don't listen to the harsh reviews calling Anna's vantage point into question. Yes, it's a harsh and infuriating topic. But she's done a marvelous job telling her story, and it's one of the best-told such stories you'll find.

I am writing to provide some background for the readers of the abovebook, since I feel that I can clarify some matters about which somehave been curious. My wife and I are the old couple mentioned in theepilogue of Anna's book, with whom she has lived on and off forseveral years. Some readers have questioned whether a 16-year-oldcould write so perceptive an account, implying that she was helped byothers. Soon after she came to our house, she sat down at thecomputer and started writing. At first we did not know what she waswriting, although soon she said she was writing the story of her life.She told us a lot about her past, probably everything in her book, butthe written product we did not see. Rarely, when was pleased withsomething she had written, she would read a few pages to us, but wedid not have a chance to read the whole thing until it was beingsubmitted to the press. She worked nearly every day, sometimes forlong hours, and was very proud of having finished before her l7thbirthday, but then it was 500 typewritten pages long. In thefollowing year, still without accepting advice from us, she cut itdown to 250 pages. Early in her stay with us, of course we wonderedabout her stories and the accuracy of her recollections. We got acopy of the records from the institution where she spent about a year.We found no inconsistancies; she tells the truth. Nothing bad was saidabout her in the records except by way of her mother's accounts. Somehave wondered how she could remember accurately all the things thatshe reports. Of course she may misinterpret as much as anyone else,but we early learned that she has a remarkable memory forconversations and emotions. She would give us an account of someepisode, and then months later expect that we remembered the details,and she knew exactly what she had told us (it all sounded familiarwhen she had to repeat it). I am sure that every episode that shedescribes is correct as she understood it, and I have a lot ofconfidence that her interpretations are accurate. ...

This is a very painful but important book, and an accurate depiction of the world as it is perceived by children and adolescents. All who work with young people should read this book: teachers, librarians and mental health professionals. I hope that more young people will write about the lives of quiet desperation that they are leading in this country and around the world. I do not care to judge whether this book is the product of a distorted perception of a mentally ill child. Whether Anna was truly mentally ill or not, her words and her pain echoed my own childhood. When children suffer, they may have a tendency to distort what they are perceiving in the world around them, and they may exagerate what they see and experience, but there is no doubt that strange and bizarre and sick things do occur in their lives. The words in this book are written by a child in pain, a child who has no doubt suffered. She should not be judged as to the accuracy of her accounts of her own pain. It is so obviously real. Even if Anna did have a loving home and a loving family, no child in this world is immune to the the sick things that do occur. It is enough to drive anyone to the point that Anna was driven to and that she so poignantly describes in this book. I applaud Anna for her insights into the injustices that children suffer every day. It is a wonder that all children don't go insane.