A Novel About Obsession

Earlier this month, I wrote on Facebook that I had started work on my new novel. It’s a bit of a departure for me as it tackles the topic of obsession and has a true-crime aura, albeit fiction. I received a lot of congratulations and interest, and so I’m writing again every day.

Yesterday, when I mentioned this project to a friend, she was intrigued. “Oh, I love it,” she said. She asked me to give her more details. It’s about a woman stalking a man, harassing him, I said. What motivates her to try and ruin this man and have so little faith in herself that her entire identity is wrapped up in a relationship gone wrong, especially when she is an accomplished and educated woman?

She went on to tell me that when she was in her twenties, she had dated a man for three years. When he broke up with her, she began stalking him. When she looks back on that time in her life, she realizes that it was not just her anger at being rejected but her attempt to reestablish the relationship. It was wrong, she said.

Maybe the past is why she told me she enjoys watching “crazy women” on YouTube. “I’ll send you links to some of the videos,” she offered. When I got home, the links, half a dozen were there. In one of them, a woman screams and pounds on her ex-boyfriend’s door, begging him to talk to her. Begging over and over. When he refuses and tells her to go away, she tries to smash his window glass with a patio chair. He’s afraid of calling the police because he thinks they will side with her. After she punched him in the face, he knocked her to the ground. Meanwhile, he records it all on his cellphone.

Dark obsession is something Stephen King had written about years ago in his novel Misery. And we all remember the movie Fatal Attraction with Glenn Close and Michael Douglas. But I have to wonder: Did things get worse after the MeToo Movement?

Writers explore topics that interest them. Being a lifelong feminist, I always felt that the egregious behavior of men who could sexually assault and abuse women without repercussion needed to be rectified. But when angry women feel victimized and suspect they can weaponize law enforcement and the judicial system to their advantage with false allegations of abuse and assault, then how much progress have we made?

What motivates a person to seek revenge? What sparks their obsession? Why do some people not accept the consequences of their decision to enter into a relationship that is unhealthy but then stay with it?

I think so much of what we’re living now is a study of anger, polarization, and the feeling that others are to blame for whatever is lacking in our own lives. How do we deal with this? Who is to blame? How does it end?

I became the target of obsession when I first became engaged to my husband, something I wrote about in my memoir Again in a Heartbeat. His mother, in a fury, came after me with a knife and stabbed me through the hand. Was it her fear of a loss of control … of losing her son to another woman? If she had been on medication, would she have been a different person?

Craziness and anger are rampant these days. Have people lost all ground, all belief in themselves? Do they feel their lives are over and destruction is the answer? Writing is a journey. This novel offers an exploration of the human heart. And so I write.