I'll Just Be Five More Minutes
And Other Tales from My ADHD Brain
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A hilariously-honest, heartwarming essay collection about life, love, and discovering you have ADHD at age 35
Despite being a published writer with a family, a gaggle of internet fans, and (most shockingly) a mortgage, Emily Farris could never get her sh*t together. As she saw it, disorganization was one of her countless character flaws—that is until she was diagnosed with ADHD at age 35. Like many girls who go undiagnosed, Emily grew up internalizing criticisms about her impulsivity and lack of follow-through. She held onto that shame as she tried (and often failed) to fit into a world designed for neurotypical brains.
I'll Just Be Five More Minutes is a personal essay collection of laugh-out-loud-funny, tear-jerking, and at times cringey true stories of Emily's experiences as a neurodivergent woman. With the newfound knowledge of her ADHD, Emily candidly reexamines her complicated relationships (including one with a celebrity stalker), her money problems, the years she spent unknowingly self-medicating, and her hyperfixations (two words: decorative baskets).
A memoir-in-essays both entertaining and enlightening, I'll Just Be Five More Minutes is for people with ADHD, as well as those who know and love them. This is a powerful collection of deeply relatable, wide-ranging stories about a woman's right to control her own body, about overwhelm and oversharing, about drinking too much and sleeping too little, and about being misunderstood by the people closest to you. At its heart, I’ll Just Be Five More Minutes is about not quite fitting in and not really understanding why—something we’ve all felt whether we're neurodivergent or not.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In these animated essays, Mother Mother podcaster Farris (Casserole Crazy) reflects on living with ADHD. "How We Got Here" recounts how Farris—struggling to juggle the responsibilities of motherhood and her job as a social media manager while keeping up with everyday chores—saw her troubles reflected in an article about women with ADHD, leading her to get diagnosed with the condition at age 35. The humorous entries offer insight into what it's like to have ADHD. For instance, "Re: New Thread" presents increasingly harried emails from Farris to a client as a two-hour copywriting gig turns into a two-day project that comes to include retooling the client's website, illustrating how people with ADHD "often underestimate how long it will take to get something done" and get distracted by unrelated tasks. Farris is frank about the challenges of the condition (she reports that fights with her husband often start because her poor impulse control leads her to make significant purchases the couple can't afford), but the essays are mostly lighthearted and comical, as when she details her sensory processing issues around rubbing fabric, writing that "the mere experience of watching someone rub their hand on their jeans will send me running into the other room." The result is a buoyant exploration of neurodivergence.
