Minnesota author Jonathan Friesen visited with students at Becker Middle School Wednesday, signing copies of several of his novels and speaking to them about the difficulties of growing up with Tourette’s Syndrome while he was still in grade school.  His presentation focused on the importance of “seeing’ those around us who look or act differently, and finding a way to make them feel a part of the world in spite of their differences.

 

Friesen spoke about his experiences with a wide variety of people he has met and talked to as he travels around the country, including his personal failures to make those kinds of connections in his own life.  He talked about staying in a large hotel on a visit to Denver in which he stayed in a huge suite with two king-sized beds with 10 pillows and two wall-mounted television sets, most of which he could not use.  Going out late one night to a store to purchase a jar of cashews, he encountered a homeless man who was setting up his cardboard bed under a heating vent already wet with snow. 

 

Once they made eye contact, he said, he saw that the man had a curiously deformed face, but that he was smiling anyway.  “To my shame,” Friesen said, “I ended up turning and walking away with my jar of cashews,” and “100 feet up and 100 feet in I spent the night with two beds and 10 pillows while he slept under a vent in the snow.”

 

He also spoke movingly about a prison presentation he gave in which the prisoners, all in orange jumpsuits and given numbers rather than the names, responded very emotionally to his description of people who are “unseen” by others and who need some kind of affirmation, kind or even unkind, that they are still in the world.

 

His first book, “Jerk” (the title refers to one of the nicknames he had in school, because of the involuntary muscle movements the disease causes), which led him to retire to his room at home, never coming out except to eat or use the bathroom. A girl in his class, who he refers to as “a she,” finally broke him out of his self-imposed prison by simply coming to his home and spending an hour talking with him.  That one experience “opened the world to him,” he said, and made it possible for him to leave his room.

 

His other books include “Rush,” the story of an adrenaline addict who becomes a “smoke jumper” to satisfy the craving, and “The Last Martin,” whose central character operates under a “name curse” that may have grave consequences.  A donation by the student council made the books available for purchase by students at three dollars, according to BMS media specialist Holly Wieber.

 

Friesen’s latest book, “Both of Me,” is not yet out in paperback, but is available in the stacks in the BMS library.  The plot revolves around an English girl from London who is on the run from a terrible event in her past, who falls in love with a boy with a dual personality disorder.  Friesen described the condition as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), in which a person has two distinct personalities that are fully independent of each other, the one performing actions that the other is completely unaware of.

 

In between lectures, Friesen met with students in small groups and signed books for student buyers during the lunch break.

 

A Twin Cities native, Friesen lives with his wife and children on a horse farm near Mora, MN.