Attention, a Love Story

by Casey Schwartz

(Pantheon, $27)

When Casey Schwartz took Adderall for the first time, “it was as though she had developed a new superpower,” said Alice Robb in The New Statesman.

The future science journalist was just a college freshman, and that first blue pill instantly transformed her into the hyperfocused scholar she aspired to be—able to work all night, run 10 miles in the morning, and barely pause for regular meals. By senior year, the same drug had landed her in the hospital—and still she didn’t give it up. In her new book, Schwartz uses her 12-year enthrallment to the ADHD medication—a form of speed—to launch a deeper inquiry. While other writers routinely ask why we are so distracted these days, “she concerns herself instead with more profound questions: What does it mean to pay attention? What deserves our attention, and how do we decide?”

Given its subject, the book is “comically unfocused,” said Parul Sehgal in The

New York Times. Once Schwartz is done describing her dependence on Adderall and all that it cost her, “the book steps away from straightforward memoir and starts flailing, taking up whatever aspects of attention can hold Schwartz’s own.” The narrative soon leaps from the science of ADHD to “pointless, pallid” excursions into how psychedelics might aid focus and what writers including Simone Weil, William James, and David Foster Wallace have had to tell us about attention. Some of these passages are so unoriginal they “feel grafted from Wikipedia.”

“The sections on Adderall are undeniably the best,” said Annalisa Quinn in NPR.org. At a sentence level, Schwartz can be “brilliant, funny, and clear,” and she makes us feel what it means to be in love with attention, to aspire to a level of engagement that allows us to lose ourselves in something beyond ourselves. But because she searches for a point without finding one, I’ll take inspiration from her book’s subtitle to suggest one: Love is what she’s truly describing. After all, “every important element of love is about sustained, sometimes effortful, nonutilitarian attention to someone else. That, it turns out, is everything.”