Fall for the Book

For this assignment, I attended Merri Lisa Johnson’s presentation on her book Girl in Need of a Tourniquet. This was in the JC Cinema at noon on Thursday September 22nd. Once Johnson took the podium she mentioned a few things not having anything to necessarily do with the book. A specific comment that stuck out to me was when she thanked a student for picking her up at the airport and she mentioned that she doesn’t feel right in cars and how there’s something about break lights that freaks her out, PTSD. I believe she started with this because it kind of tells us about her and one of her underlying issues. When it came to the presentation, she said that she was trying something new and I believe that she nailed it. I'm not really sure the best way to describe this, but she wanted to blend in her actual comments with the story she was telling. She mentioned that Agusta did this well and she based her presentation off of that style. Merri Lisa Johnson was a great public speaker and I really like how she broke down her presentation into chapters. She would tell us, the audience, the name of the chapter in the book and then she gave us a name as if she was renaming it. She went through the first three chapters by reading some of the text and also inserting her own comments along the way, some about her and some about other writers. Throughout this I learned a lot, I learned about her as a person, PTSD, and borderline personally disorder. She was great about telling us the real her, she didn’t try to hide anything and that was one of her main points. She commented about how BPD is portrayed as dangerous to others and she hates that. She said that although BPD has flaws it also has gifts such as, it served her well as a writer and as a feminist. Overall, I really wasn’t expecting anything out of this simply because I have never been to one of these events before. So to answer the question did it meet my expectation, I would have to say “I loved it.” I had fun attending this and I think that I am going to buy the book; she drew me to it and in some way inspired me.