Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

Graphic memoirs for teens about college graduates aren’t always a good option for my 13-year-old, but Alex Graudins’ Improve: How I Discovered Improv and Conquered Social Anxiety is a solid exception. (Technically, I suppose, the first 20 pages cover Alex’s life before college, and the next 15-20 cover college, but she’s a graduate before page 40.) Instead of being a generalized memoir–which might have involved serious relationships and other middle-school-inappropriate activities–Improve really does focus on Graudins’ anxiety struggles and what improv did to help her manage them. (It IS possible that the number of pages devoted to describing different improv games might not fascinate my girlie, but I found them interesting, and if she’s bored, she can skim, right?) Improv as therapy might be more of a specialized idea, but Graudins’ openness about her struggle and the normalcy with which she refers to therapy and medication are a beautiful thing. We need more books–fiction and non–that normalize mental health struggles and their treatment, and this is a solid option. I’ll let you know if it inspires my older girls to investigate the world of improv!