Book Club Chaos: A True ADHD Story

Dear Reader Friends,

Hey, it’s your ADHD friend Denise with another peek behind the curtain of my life’s misadventures.

A few years ago, three of my Illinois friends and I decided to start Book Club. The thought of hanging out with my friends, drinking wine, and chatting about books sounded like the guilty pleasure I’d been missing in my life. That is, until Marovich, my best friend since seventh grade, decided it would be good for all of us to “edumacate” ourselves and “read the classics.” (Cue up the video pause as the needle goes scratching across the record.)

There are few things in life I love more than books. Okay, standup comedy would be my first love. But books are a close second.

I love non-fiction and fiction. I read biographies, autobiographies, business theories, self-help books, horror, mysteries, sci-fi, crime suspense, etc. On at least one occasion, my diverse reading appetite saved the day. Trudy, one of my Book Club members, used to head up our pub trivia team. At the end of every competition, we would get a photocopy of a random group of people images to identify. One night, there was this pre-World War II black-and-white photo of a woman with extremely long legs. It stumped everyone.

That is, except for yours truly.

I had just finished reading the biography of Julia Child. Included in this pub trivia menagerie of people images was the photo I had just seen of Julia Child in her early 20s, sitting on the grass in front of her Pasadena home before she joined the OSS. I was the only one in the entire pub to guess it correctly.

That night, we almost won pub trivia. (To be fair, we had Cialis-level stiff competition.)

I bring up my voracious reading history to justify my existence as a Book Club member. (Years later, I’m still litigating this in my mind.)

I’m not a total hack when it comes to discussing authors or writing book reviews. I wrote this heart-felt review for my friend Jerry’s book HADES’ KISS (he goes by the author name G.J. Bingham) because I loved it so much:

Jerry’s book HADES’ KISS struck such a chord in me, I was inspired to create his book trailer.

In true ADHD fashion, if a topic doesn’t interest me, I’m on the short-bus of all struggle buses. Literary classics are my Achilles’ Heel. My personal “white whale,” to borrow a Moby Dick reference. (In fact, I think Moby Dick was one of those boring books we were assigned to read in Book Club. Or maybe it was Old Man and the Sea? I conflate seafaring books. To me, they’re all insomnia cures.)

People assume that because I love books so much, I’ve read all of the classics. I haven’t. My husband Dave did this beautiful painting of Ahab’s Wife, this sturdy woman with a peg leg, depicting the mythical widow from Moby Dick. I never told Dave, but I’d never read the book. I embraced the painting and hung it in our living room because I love that it tells a story in one image: that menacing whale in the foggy background. It’s just the right amount of creepy.

Ahab’s Wife, oil on canvas, by artist Dave Dorman

As a Christmas surprise this year, Dave bought me this black and white illustration of a man covered in Maori-style facial tattoos. It was illustrated by our aforementioned author and artist friend, Jerry Bingham, which made it an extra-special gift. I could sense Dave’s excitement, so I opened the package as quickly as I could. I was unable to mask my confusion.

“Why did you buy me an illustration of Mr. T?”

(To my mind, this could only be Mr. T . . . or Harvey Keitel in The Piano.)

“It’s Ishmael!”

“Who’s Ishmael?”

There it was. That mixture of disgust and disappointment that often crosses my husband’s face when my ignorance of art, film, or history rears its ugly head. He’s read or seen everything. Every classic. Every opera. Every everything. His knowledge is encylopedic on most topics. Dave would’ve made better contributions to my friends’ Book Club.

Our first Book Club assignment was to read Bram Stoker’s Dracula. That was probably the first problem. That word. “Assignment.” The moment you frame something as an “assignment,” my inner rebel wants to Forrest Gump-run in the opposite direction.

I’m a longtime horror fan, so I was quasi-interested in reading Dracula. But I kept postponing and procrastinating. The executive functioning part of my brain sorely underestimated how long it would take me to read Dracula.

The day before Book Club, I still hadn’t cracked it opened. I weighed going back to Barnes & Noble to pick up Clif’s Notes, but I ran out of a time — a steadfast theme in ADHD land. I once stayed up an entire night in ADHD hyperfocus mode reading Stieg Larsson’s last book, The Girl Who Played With Fire, until daybreak. I placed the bet on my brain’s roulette wheel that I could do it again.

A third of the way through Dracula, I nodded off.

At Book Club, I was sweating bullets. I’m not a good poker player. Marovich could see it all over my face. I was doing my level best to fake my way through this scholarly literary discussion.

“Can I pour you more wine?” I’d ask, to change the subject, when I sensed a question about to be directed at me.

ADHD expert Dr. Russell Barkley’s greatest line is so true: “It’s not Attention Deficit Disorder. It’s INTENTION Deficit Disorder.” We ADHDers do have the best of intentions. It’s just that the outcomes we imagine are vastly different from the real-life outcomes.

At the next Book Club, we had to read To Kill a Mockingbird. I’d read it years ago and enjoyed it, but I have this thing. I can’t read a book a second time (caveat: unless it’s David Sedaris, because he makes me laugh so hard, or something I love as much as Stephen King’s The Stand). Rather than re-reading the book, I decided to watch the movie the night before to refresh my memory. Surely, I assumed, the movie didn’t deviate from the book?

But Marovich was gunnin’ for me.

The literary discussion was going smoothly until Marovich asked me what I thought about Atticus Finch having an affair with his secretary. She’s clever like that. She saw my eyes widen in fear.

“A-HA! I knew it! You didn’t read it, did you?”

I was busted.

“I watched the movie!” I pleaded. “That part didn’t make it into the movie!”

After that, Book Club disbanded. Or perhaps they held secret meetings so I was no longer there to disrupt the flow of their literary discussions.

Me ever reading the classics became Book Club’s white whale.