Natália Elias

What if the strangest quirks—the sock that stays on and the one that doesn't, the rituals you'd never confess—were precisely what makes you human? In Manual of an Uncontrolled Mind, Natália opens her mind wide and shares, unfiltered, what it's like to live with OCD: the obsessions, the rituals, and the fears that no one sees. Funny, honest, and deeply relatable, this book invites you to laugh at your own eccentricities—and perhaps discover that you're not as strange as you thought.

Everyone thinks living abroad is glamorous. Natalia knew that wasn't quite the case after thirteen suitcases, a seven-month-old baby, a husband, and a mother-in-law took her to Madrid. In Manual of an Uncontrolled Expat, she exposes the "dark side" of expat life: language disasters, the hell of renting an apartment, a pandemic in a foreign land, and elevators with a mind of their own. Funny, honest, and not at all romanticized, this is a true gift for every woman who has ever rebuilt a life from scratch—with homesickness, chaos, and everything else.