A woman with severe OCD takes a road trip to stop the wedding of her former therapist and picks up a young hitchhiker who helps her heal from her traumatic past. 

SYNOPSIS:

Anna Beck, a woman walking the fine edge between despair and hope, is constantly at war with her own body. She has a problem: she can’t leave her small, subsidized apartment for fear of contracting some horrible germ-borne disease, but she has to make a road trip to stop the wedding of her would-be lover, her former therapist. Their relationship, borne of a chance meeting in the local laundromat, the Fluffitorium, has led Anna to explore her painful past and to hope for a future she never dreamed she’d have.

Making a road trip is a special challenge for someone with an obsessive fear of contamination, but Anna finds a way. And along that way, she meets Mellow, a teenaged hitchhiker who shoplifts Oreos, and sets off casino alarms so she can use the bathroom in private. Ultimately, the journey provides healing for both of them, but not without a Cadillac-sized helping of soul-searching and bad diner food.

Ultimately, Anna and Mellow arrive at the destination wedding, and she intends to stop it, but something else happens. She realizes that she no longer needs the approval or affection of her former therapist; she has grown and faced her own trauma and is ready to move forward with her life.

Anna Incognito deals with mental illness, loss, and renewed hope and acceptance of flaws through the insightful, biting wit of a main character at odds with herself, her past, and the world; still, she sees the humor and absurdity in it all. “Lots of narrative pull...wonderfully complicated,” says Jincy Willett, author of The Writing Class, whose work David Sedaris anthologized in Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules.