Catching an Orange

What if the most important conversation of your life lasted only three days? “Once you begin reading Crider’s utterly transfixing, vulnerable, and honest memoir, you won’t be able to stop. Crider’s stylish sentences investigate the space where brilliance and mental illness collide. Her story is heartbreaking and important.” — Amanda Eyre Ward, NYT-bestselling author of the Reese’s Book Club pick, The Jetsetters

“Honest, gripping, heartbreaking.” — Jenny Lawson, bestselling author of Furiously Happy “With piercing honesty and unexpected humor, Amy Crider reshapes the mental health memoir into something wholly original—intimate, fearless, and unforgettable.” — Julie Ryan McGue, author of Twice a Daughter and Twice the Family. “Amy Crider proves an unforgettable companion for a daring journey — through her own mental health, and a system that often fails her. Catching an Orange tells a story of blurred lines, a mysterious connection, and an unlikely triumph.” — Rob Walker, author of The Art of Noticing 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 assertion after three days that he truly knows her—“Yes, Amy, I do”—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.

Author Biography

Amy Crider is an award-winning novelist and playwright who has won honors for both fiction and drama. Born in Ohio and raised in rural upstate New York, she studied theater at Goddard College and later trained at Second City and Chicago Dramatists. Her work explores themes of redemption, courage, and compassion. She lives in Chicago.