Catching an Orange

Three days with a psychiatrist. Thirty years of letters. One remarkable memoir.

"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

"Catching An Orange is a vivid, absorbing, at times astonishing book. Startlingly honest and intimate, reading it feels like reading a stack of deeply moving personal letters found left behind on a Greyhound bus — letters meant for someone else but entrancing, revealing and affecting nonetheless. This book is not just a love story; it's many love stories overlapping and intertwined, which is how real life often flows. It has broadened and deepened the way I think about mental health challenges, and will stay with me for a very long time." — Davy Rothbart, contributor to NPR's This American Life, creator of Found Magazine, and author of My Heart Is an Idiot

"Amy Crider’s Catching an Orange is unflinching and tender in its depiction of mental illness and a difficult first marriage. Written as a letter, an elegy, and a heroine’s journey, the book is elegant and unexpectedly inspiring." — Rachel Swearingen, author of How to Walk on Water and Other Stories

"Sometimes, almost miraculously, a brief encounter with the right person can have a lasting impact on our lives. Catching an Orange is Amy Crider's moving ode to a therapist she only knew for three days, as well as an absorbing chronicle of her battle with mental illness during the latter years of the twentieth century. Her story shows us that even now, psychiatry is no match for the wonders and sufferings of the all-too-human mind." — Christina Pugh, author of The Right Hand

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 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.

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.