Amy Crider's introspective memoir, Catching an Orange, illuminates her mental health struggles. The intriguing title refers to a dream Crider had just before she learned of her long-ago psychiatrist's death. Reading his obituary, she felt she'd lost a valued confidant: "I want to tell you everything, and you are gone."
Chicago-based novelist/playwright Crider (Kells) highlights the turning points in "a lifetime of crippling anxiety." While in graduate school in upstate New York, she reunited with a high school friend whose brother she married. Together she and her first husband bought farmland and built a house. Her husband took on big DIY projects and had ideas for inventions but never followed through. Learning of her mother's personality disorder and her husband's paranoid schizophrenia explained their behavior and interactions with her. Her own bipolar diagnosis accounted for her manic episodes and the occasional hallucinations and delusions that resulted in hospitalizations. During one of these, she met Dr. L. and started writing to him--a habit she maintained for 30 years, even though their acquaintance lasted just three days.
Crider's recollections constitute a warm, frank confession addressed "Dear Dr. L." Dissolution of her first marriage became inevitable; her ex's boat-building disasters came to symbolize failure to keep the relationship afloat. The title image suggests newfound control ("I caught a ball for the first time") as Crider takes ownership of her past and future. She imagines Dr. L. replying, "Who do you think threw it to you?"--proof that even brief connections matter profoundly. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck