"When you piss in a cereal bowl and let it cool to room temperature, it behaves a lot like chicken noodle soup under the same conditions."

This and many other life lessons from Sara Benincasa can be discovered in, Agorafabulous!: Dispatches from My Bedroom. When I found this book, I couldn't not read it. Humorous memoirs have sorta been my bag as of late and I am a sucker for cutsey, cheeky images on book covers. Say what you will, but I will almost always give a book with a clever title or twee cover the good college try. Anyway, this book did not disappoint. I was definitely interested in reading an account about agoraphobia, having dealt with anxiety myself, and I always appreciate raw experienced-based humor. Sara is very honest and expressive about all of her very difficult experiences and actually made it entertaining to read about.

"Comedy is tragedy plus time, right?"

The book begins with The Thing Before the Rest of the Thing, where Sara describes her state of mind during some of the darker accounts told in her memoir. It then continues on to an introduction where she tells about about a childhood friend, a handsome shining star with a bright future, who committed suicide under horrible circumstances. Sara sights this incident throughout her decline into agoraphobia as a kind of starting point or gauge of her mental health. This story really stuck with me and I related with Sara's inability to accept the situation - if someone so seemingly stable and well off was vulnerable to such mental instability, how are the rest of us safe? Sara was raised in a Catholic household, so she accounts her struggles with thoughts of suicide and premarital sex throughout the book as well.

After the death of her peer, Sara next recounts a trip to Sicily with her classmates during her senior year of high school. Although Sara had suffered from panic attacks before, she sights this trip as an benchmark, revealing the first warning signs of the excruciating and crippling anxiety to come. Despite the very real and serious subject matter, Sara's retelling of her panic attack inside of a foreign gas station bathroom was ultimately very funny and gripping.

After starting college, Sara's mental state goes into a rapid decline and she finds herself unable to leave her apartment and eventually her room. She begins starving herself to rid herself of energy so she can all day. And of course pissing in bowls.

"When your daily routine includes repeatedly convincing yourself not to commit suicide, you probably won't have time left over to prepare haute cuisine."

Her grades begin to drop as she is unable attend class and her friends eventually alert her parents, who pick Sara up from her dorm and bring her home for help. During what she refers to as her "qualifying indecent", Sara goes back home to live with her parents while she meets with a new therapist to treat her anxieties.

Through medication and therapy treatment, Sara eventually learns to cope with her anxieties and lands a job working for a mentally unstable spiritual guru. She accounts her experiences of coping with and quitting her new job, going back to college, serious relationships, teaching experiences and eventually moving to New York City to attend grad school at Columbia University.

I was actually surprised about what an uplifting book this was. Sara accounts her very emotional struggles with a debilitating disorder but in a way that is funny and tells you she will eventually recover, which she does. Although many points of this book as raw and exposing, Sara ultimately rises above all of them to became a happy, healthy individual who hardly thinks about the long list of phobias posted in the beginning of her memoir that once used to confine her to her bedroom. Agorafabuous! introduced me to unknown information about an interesting anxiety disorder, and more importantly introduced me to a very funny, strong and unique comedian. I hope to see more from Sara as she continues to succeed as a comic.

"Fear built on fear begets all kinds of little falsehoods."