Rating: 
Summary: Author's Comments are Revealing
Review: It was interesting to see what the author of the autobiographical_Becoming Anna_ recently had to say about it and some of the controversial issues which have surfaced concerning it.. Some previous reader reviews have noted that while Anna ("Tiffany", in most of the book) very much resents having her feelings and actions incorrectly judged by others, she doesn't hesitate to make blanket (mostly negative) assumptions about others' motivations, actions, and ideas. Unfortunately, although Ms Michener seems to have gained some insight into what happened in her early teens, her comments in "A Little Background" clearly demonstrate that as in her book, she still is quite judgmental and is prone to making very negative assumptions about others - particularly those who have criticized either the style or questioned the content of her book. Statements such as "Most people who claim my story is unbelievable show appalling ignorance...", "...adults who believe their job is to make life unpleasant for bad children...", and referring to critical reader-reviewers' statements as "nasty...hateful...disgusted" reveal far more about Ms Michener's perceptions than she perhaps intends. How can she possibly know what degree of knowledge of child abuse issues (or mental health care issues) her readers possess? Also puzzling is the statement that "Whenever people claim that I seem to want my readers to believe that I lived in a black and white world of child good guys and adult bad guys, I can only assume what they are really upset about is the fact that I am disputing their already black-and-white idea that no child could be so abused and unloved by so many adults unless it was deserved". This sentence is comparing apples and oranges, a good lawyer's trick - but it doesn't work here. Criticism of inadequate characterization doesn't mean that the critic thinks that "no child could be abused and unloved unless it was deserved". This is the most glaring example of the author's apparently fragile ego and propensity to negatively judge others and assign very negative ideas and motivations to them which in this case, appear to be totally unrelated to the issue of poor characterization. Ms Michener concludes her statement by again referring to herself as "a child abuse victim" - not a survivor; not an adult who dealt with - and who evidently still deals with- very difficult childhood issues. This is quite revealing. Now in her early 20s, Ms Michener is no longer a child. It is one thing to have written _Becoming Anna_ at 16 - quite another to still demonstrate consistently negative judgmentalism at 22 or so. Ms Michener claims to have "answers ..found later in life" (which she deliberately did not include in her book) ... but are they the correct answers? She also states that "Confusion was a large and terrible part of what it felt like", in reference to her childhood. It appears that some of that confusion is still present. It is discouraging to read this statement, which indicates that rather than increasing in maturity, insight, and compassion, the author instead is becoming entrenched in her negativity and her self-proclaimed position as a mistreated child. This book, along with the author's statement, create many questions in my mind, rather than answering them satisfactorily. The author is obviously still very much a "work in progress". I hope that with added maturity Ms Michener will become secure enough to allow herself to honestly examine the difficult issues of her past (and critics' responses to her book) in a less emotional and judgmental manner. Then she could truly "become" the person she has the potential to be: honest with both herself and others, blessed with great creative gifts, and having overcome great personal pain, full of compassion and caring for others.
Rating: 
Summary: Terrifyingly accurate, I lived this nightmare.
Review: 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 distinguishes this book from more distanced accounts.
Perhaps the author could write another book, later in life, from a different perspective. But the sixteen-year-old perspective is important. This book tells us directly, as few books can, what it feels like to be a teen in the psychiatric system. A remembrance by a thirty-year-old would not have the same effect. I'm sure the author will have plenty of time to write by the time she is thirty, and I hope she does, but I am glad she wrote this at the age she did, flaws and all.
Some of the flaws or omissions bear mentioning, even if they make the book part of what it is. The author does tend toward unabashed pity of other people, which I would not want to be on the receiving end of, even if I can understand its source. While the author clearly doesn't believe anyone should be in those circumstances, she does seem to think that some people are 'sick' and others aren't, and to differentiate between them in certain contexts. Simultaneously she assumes that some patients act a certain way because they have been abused, when there are other reasons to act that way -- but it could be that she found out they were abused at some point, and did not make the context of her knowledge explicit in the book. These lines are fuzzier than they appear.
But it's hard to complain about that when I know that at her age at the time of writing the book, I had been beaten into submission until I bought the psychiatric lines about me completely. She shows a nearly unfaltering sociological perspective that I lost and had to regain.
I have lent this book to other people to explain my past, how few rights minors have, and emotional and physical abuse by psychiatric professionals. It's currently loaned to someone who knows all too well what this is like, having experienced it thirty years ago.
I was only able to read it once. The degree of recognition and pain it unleashed immobilized me for several hours. All I felt during that time was searing mental pain, the like of which I have never encountered after reading less vivid, less accurate descriptions. But it was important to read it. It let me know I was not alone, my experiences and the things I was told were not unique at all to my situation. Reading this book at the time I did somehow loosened the grip of the past, letting me see the present more clearly after years of daily flashbacks.
If people want to know what the American child and adolescent psychiatric system is really like, they should read this. It presents a reality that is true to the lives of too many people.
Rating: 
Summary: A Little Background
Review: Most reviewers have had either something very nice or very nasty to say about me and my book. Which side a review falls on depends on whether or not the reviewer wants to hear/believe what I describe it was like for me to grow up with my family and then be committed by my mother to a private, then state mental institution in my early teens. It is important to note that most people with believe me have had similar experiences of abuse. Most people who claim my story is unbelievable show appalling ignorance about how child abuse works in general. It might be helpful for me to explain a little about this. First of all, a child abuser is not usually someone you can pick out of a line-up. No one is all good and no one is all bad, and no on behaves in exactly the same way towards everyone they know. Therefore it stands to reason that a friend, neighbor, teacher, social worker, mental health worker, or even family memeber who is very polite, friendly, even loving to many people could ALSO be very cruel to a child of children in certain cicumstances. Child abusers are people, people with problems. No happy, healthy person just wakes up one morning and decides it would be fun to be abusive to a child. I am amazed at how many people point out how extremely physically ill my mother is, and that she was a victim of abuse herself, as if this is evidence that she could not have been abusive to me. On the contrary, this made her a classic candidate. Under extreme stress, without any supportive adults in her life to turn to, she vented her frustration towards the only people around more helpless than her- her children. In the beginning she naturally felt very guitly with she lost control with her own children. I remember her becomming very apologetic and affectionate after her outburst when I was very young. But as time went by and she did not know how to stop, or even how to ask for help, she unconciously began to justify her abuse because she did not know how to deal with this overwhelming guilt. MOST child abusers do this. MOST abusers of any kind do not realize they are abusers because they have come to believe that there is something so wrong with the victim that it mandates extreme actions. This situation is complicated in child abuse cases by the fact that abuse ALWAYS causes dysfunction in children and this dysfunction encourages further abuse from the original abusers, and sometimes from others as well. By the time I was thirteen I had several psychological problems common to child abuse victims. (I am surprised when some reviewers think they have "discovered" these problems by "reading between the lines" when in fact I am very frank about them.) By the time the fact that something was very wrong in my family was made known outside my home, the fact of the constant abuse I was suffering was completely overshadowed by my pathetic, sickly mother's story that I was just a lying severely disturbed, and unmanagable teenager. (Aside from my actual problems, including desperate acts to get attention and the strong DESIRE to be able to fight off my abusers, she added all sorts of fabrications about me starting fires, abusing animals, ACTUALLY threatening and injuring family members, and being unable to discern fantasy from reality. All of these things are completely untrue.) Our society has little sympathy, and a lot of disgust and hatred to vent towards "disturbed and unmanagable" teenagers. (And if you don't believe this, why would you write a disgusted and hateful review about how disturbed and untruthful you think I am for saying so?) Even in pysch wards that are supposed to help these young people this prejudice is strong and rampant. By DESIGN, institutions are not places where anyone would want to go and feel safe and loved and heal from psychological wounds. They are SET UP to simply control behavior with extreme restriction, drugs, constant overseeing and prodding, and punishment. Again, the people who abuse children in this way do not think of themselves as abusers, they believe they are doing society a favor by forcing it's dregs to "shape up." Strange that so many of my reviewers don't believe/understand why the majority of the adults I encountered in environments like this were unkind to me. What reason would adults who believe it is their job to make life unpleasant for bad children, and who believed I was a bad child, have to be kind to me? Not understanding how this works is like not understanding why a book written by a holocaust survivor would report that the majority of Nazis were unkind to them. Likewise, when reviewers complain that I include unfavorable descriptions of how many of my abusers looked it is clear they don't understand that people in a job where they feel required to BE unpleasant to children will not LOOK very pleasant to one of these children. I assume that some of the people I describe might look fine when they are smiling and friendly, but since this is not the side they showed to me this is not a side I have to report. Nowhere in my book do I say, or even imply, that all adults are bad and all children are good. In fact, I think my book demonstrates very well how otherwise good people can do bad things because of social prejudices. Likewise I show how the victims of such prejudices- in this case children labled by the mental health system- have good sides that are overlooked (even though they are not saints themselves). Whenever people claim that I seem to want my readers to believe that I lived in a black and white world of child good guys and adult bad guys, I can only assume what they are really upset about is the fact that I am disputing their already black-and-white idea that no child could be so abused and unloved by so many adults unless it was deserved. I am also baffled when reviewers point out the good things in my childhood, such as the fact that I had toys, as if this somehow cancels out the negative part of my experience. Do people really think that if you do something nice for a child nothing else you ever do can then qualify as abuse? That goes back to the notion that abusers are monsters without any good sides. And that ties right into the idea that abuse is only abuse if it is perpetrated against a child without any bad side. I've never claimed to be a perfect, innocent child. I simply wonder what good harsh, unloving treatment does even to the most ill-behaved or insane child. There are many good books that explain the dynamics of dysfunctional and abusive families, and about the problems of child welfare and mental health systems from a general, external viewpoint ("And They Call It Help" is a high recommendation from me). However, I did not set out to write another one of those books. I set out to write what child abuse FELT like for one specific victim- myself. Confusion was a large and terrible part of what it felt like. Like most child abuse victims during their experience, I really had no idea why the people around me were doing what they were doing. I specifically avoided offering any answers I have found later in life so I would not detract from conveying what it was like not to have them. I am amazed that there are people out there who doubt a child abuse victim who is relating her experiences because she can't/doesn't explain them.....
Rating: 
Summary: This book has the power to change the world.
Review: Never in my life have I read such a powerful, moving, gut-wrenching and all too authentic book. This book has the power to change your life, to change soo many people's lives if only the people high up on the board of directors at these state hospitals would listen for half a second.
Words cannot describe how much this book moved me. I've read other accounts of abuse before. _A Child Called It_ and _Sybil_, namely. They didn't even come close to having the incredible emotional impact on me that this book had. I cried, I sobbed, I became thoughtful, I re-evaluated my life, I made a vow that some day I was going to make a difference to people like Anna who are trapped by the merciless and brutal society we have constructed around ourselves.
Anna is the unfortunate victim.... Her parents and her grandparents claim incessantly from the time she is a small girl that she is crazy and that there is something wrong with her. .... She is not allowed to have any friends. This makes her a social outcast in school and toment ensues there as well as on the home front. Her mother commits her to a mental insitution - twice - on the basis of pure lies. It makes me so angry to see all these adults that believed the mother's lies and treated Anna with less respect than a guinea pig (who was, by the way, Anna's only friend in the world). The horrors that were dealt her and others at the state hospital are barbaric and extremely difficult to read about. However, we MUST read about it, we must listen, we must take action, for if it is that hard to read about, imagine how challenging it must be to actually live?? They say that people go to the hospital to be rehibilitated. What a joke that is! None of the staff people gave a damn about her or anyone else there! Kids would try to kill themselves and the staff would only send them into isolation for punishment! The last thing a suicidal person needs is more isolation. The staff forbade the kids from touching and giving support to each other, from getting regular excercise and healthy food, from talking problems out, from doing anything that so called "normal" people took for granted every day of their lives! These places should be denied funding; their "patients" leave the places worst than they came in, having been denied mere human dignity.
Anna Michener has remarkable insight to her situation and the world around her. At times, I would stop reading and think "Wow, that makes so much sense, what she just said; why can't the whole world just believe that?" Ms. Michener comments at one point (not exact quote) that "Any person born to or given over to care of someone with the knowledge and the willingness to raise them properly is _lucky_." For the first time in my life, I realized that that was true, realized that I really and truly am *lucky* to have parents, to have anybody in fact, who gives a damn about me! My parents may not be perfect, but when I stacked them up against Anna's, well, my true fortune shone through.
__Read this book with an open mind.___ The worse thing anyone can do is refuse to believe what is so plainly in front of their nose. I urge everyone to read this book. It will be worth your while. It will open your eyes up to a whole other world that you had not been aware existed, and it will bring out emotions in you that you never thought you had. Anna Michener, I applaud you for your incredible bravery and and strength in surviving all that you did. Thank you for this book. I will never forget it, I promise you that.
...
Rating:
Summary: 10 out of 5 stars
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: 10 out of 5 stars
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: i wish i could give anna a hug
Review: This book is excellent and even though the author wrote it from a understandibly bitter view...you get both sides of the story.This was a beautiful moving book. It made me cry and cry.
Rating:
Summary: abuse is real and alive
Review: this book is so powerful because she pretty much tells it exactly as it is. every word in her book is true. abused people do not fit in with society and never will because you can't even begin to understand unless it has happened to you. even if you survive it you still are an outcast. i cried through the entire book. to be able to write something that powerful at age sixteen? i recomend that abused people read this book so that they know tat they are not alone or crazy and i recomend that people who haven't been abused read this book so they can see that it is real and maybe rethink their attitude towards this very serious subject. read it and learn from it.
