Popcorn

Author and illustrator Rob Harrell draws from his personal experiences with anxiety and OCD to inform the narrative, aiming to provide an authentic and relatable depiction of these conditions for middle-grade readers. The writer has had anxiety for “as long as [he] can remember” (273), although he was unaware that this was a treatable mental health condition rather than a universal experience when he was a child. Like Popcorn’s 12-year-old protagonist, Andrew Yaeger, Harrell was deeply impacted by his anxiety in his day-to-day life as a student. From his grade school to high school years, he endured physical pain, nausea, and stomach problems “almost every day” (273). Because of the physiological ways his anxiety manifested, he was misdiagnosed with lactose intolerance while the true cause of his symptoms remained untreated for years. His anxiety also had negative psychological effects, such as intrusive thoughts, difficulty sleeping due to stress, and mental fatigue.

In middle school, Harrell’s mental health challenges increased as he developed obsessive-compulsive disorder. To add realism to his novel, the author gave Andrew some of his own compulsions, including “[t]apping things, arranging things, checking and rechecking door locks and flipping light switches X number of times” (273).