Unrequited

The summer Lisa A. Phillips turned thirty, she fell in love with someone who didn't return her feelings. She soon became obsessed. She followed him around, called him compulsively, and talked about him endlessly. One desperate morning, after she snuck into his apartment building, he picked up a baseball bat to protect himself and began to dial 911. Her unrequited love had changed her from a sane, conscientious college teacher and radio reporter into someone she barely recognized -- someone who was taking her yearning much too far. In Unrequited, Phillips explores the tremendous force of obsessive love in women's lives. She argues that it needs to be understood, respected, and channeled for personal growth -- yet it also has the potential to go terribly awry. Interweaving her own story with frank interviews and in-depth research in science, psychology, cultural history, and literature, Phillips describes how romantic obsession takes root, grows, and strongly influences our thoughts and behaviors.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Romance, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.