Shawn examines his family's phobias and his own struggle with agoraphobia in an attempt to decipher the psychological and biological puzzles that have plagued him for so long.
Critic Reviews
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Outstanding
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Booklist Donna Seaman
In assessing his [father’s] complex legacy, Shawn anchors his simultaneously disquieting and affirming study of phobias to real life and uncloaks many essential facets of the human condition. [1 Jan 2007, p.36]
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Outstanding
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Chicago Tribune Floyd Skloot
Buttressed by research in neurology, psychology, evolutionary theory and the arts, open and honest about Shawn's family and personal life, Wish I Could Be There is a harrowing, essential book about the force of fear gone wild in one person's mind and body.
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Outstanding
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New York Review Of Books Janet Malcolm
His whole book reads as if it were written by a gifted and humane doctor studying a patient who happens to be himself.
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
A lucid explication of psychopathology and a deeply felt evocation of a 'pain in the soul.' [9 Oct 2006, p.44]
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
In probing the consequences and possible causes of his phobias, Mr. Shawn has written a brave, eccentric and utterly compelling book that’s as revelatory and candid as anything ever written by Joan Didion, and as humane and scientifically fascinating as any one of Oliver Sacks’s case studies.
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Favorable
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Salon Christine Smallwood
Shawn, it must be said, is not a champion storyteller. His subject is always interesting, but his style can be reverie producing. (Occasionally one might reread a paragraph a few times without noticing.) And yet something sinister vibrates underneath. Much like a conversation with an extremely anxious person, the same territory is mined over and over, unearthed from many angles in a search for something -- a definitive cause, a cure -- that can never be found.
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Favorable
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The Nation D.T. Max
Shawn movingly details the distorting effect of phobias, the way the phobic strives simultaneously to maintain normality and avoid setting off the trip-switch in his brain.
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Favorable
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Boston Globe Amanda Heller
Afraid of everything but self-exposure, at least up to a point, Shawn performs a sort of confessional fan dance. Still, by airing his eccentricities so intriguingly, he strikes a blow for phobic liberation -- not freedom from phobia, but the freedom to be phobic and not fear admitting it.
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Mixed
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Los Angeles Times Wendy Smith
The book tries to do too many things at once, and the weakness of the parts that don't work diminishes the reader's pleasure in those that do.
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Unfavorable
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The New York Times Book Review James Campbell
The decision to parade the personal only to the extent that it provides insight into the medical is taken on grounds of tact, but most readers seek more from a book than self-therapy.
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