Catching an Orange

In this unconventional memoir, author and playwright Amy Crider writes thirty years of letters to a psychiatrist who treated her for just three days-and who never wrote back. What emerges is far more than a mental health narrative: it's a mystery story, a love letter to a man in a necktie with scientific formulas, and a meditation on the complex ways we construct our lives.

When Amy is hospitalized for a manic episode in 1993, she meets Dr. L., whose brief comment-"Yes, Amy, I do" know you-becomes the foundation for decades of one-sided correspondence. Through these letters, Amy unravels the gothic complexities of her first marriage to a man who believed he could revolutionize physics with a free-energy generator, built boats that inevitably sank, and whose family sang hymns while she descended into psychosis.

From vampire phlebotomists to sloshed psychiatrists, Crider's prose moves between philosophical revelation and dark comedy, examining how mental illness can sharpen perception even as it distorts reality. She unveils how a therapist can diagnose your mother with a personality disorder without meeting her, and uncovers why someone might stay married to a partner who insists on building boats instead of fixing the stove.

Catching an Orange defies memoir conventions with its epistolary structure and its refusal to provide easy resolution. Only after thirty years does Amy understand the true reason she never stopped writing. It's about the conversations we never finish, the people who change us in three days, and what it means to finally catch an orange.