I'm surprised at how much I loved this book. I've seen the movie, of course, and thought that it was perfectly lovely, but it wasn't something that stayed with me beyond the initial watch. I finished The Silver Linings Playbook yesterday and I'm still thinking about it. 
 I've read in some reviews that people thought that Pat was juvenile or dimwitted and didn't understand how he could have once been a high school teacher. To me, Pat wasn't juvenile or dimwitted at all. To me, he read exactly like a person who is reeling from the fall out of a mental breakdown. 
 Pat's reactions and interactions are so clear and so familiar to me. In January of this year, I myself was an inpatient in a psychiatric hospital. I didn't spend years there as Pat did, but I was there long enough for the world to feel completely foreign to me when I was discharged home. To me, it seemed that Pat was breaking everything down into their simplest parts so that he could process them without overwhelming himself. I did the exact thing. And while I was in the hospital, I noticed other patients doing this as well. 
 Until you are actually a patient in a hospital like this, I think it can be very difficult to imagine the sort of people who can be admitted. My fellow patients included those who were former teachers, former military, current teachers, doctors, researchers, MA/PhD candidates and all sorts of professional people. I myself am college educated, work in insurance and speak multiple languages. We were all at our worst while in the facility and when we discharged and for a lot of us, real life was so complicated to return to. 
 So, like Pat, a lot of us broke things into the simplest of pieces. It helped us. So, Pat saying things like "the Bad Place" and "Alone Time" didn't seem silly to me. To me, it was a broken man trying so hard to put back together the pieces of his mind and life and doing it in the only way that made sense to him at that time. 
 I loved for how it portrayed recovery and coming back to your family and life. I loved that it rang so true and clear to me. That unease with family and friends, that desperate clinging to anything that can make it all make sense, that fear, that anger, that loneliness, that longing for a normal life that's never going to be the way it once was-- that's so true and so real and my heart nearly burst with the feeling of it all.