I Know You Really Love Me: A Psychiatrist's Journal of Erotomania, Stalking, and Obsessive Love

For eight years and counting, Orion has been stalked by a former patient she calls ""Fran Nightengale."" In 1989, Fran was brought to the Tucson psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt. A drab woman in her late 30s, she seemed pathetic and harmless to Orion, who accepted Fran as a patient. Soon, however, Orion discovered that Fran was a schizophrenic with erotomanic delusions, a lesbian who targeted Orion as her ideal. Over the next eight years, Fran has stalked Orion, escalating her contacts from whimsical if scrambled missives to threatening notes and messages. Poring over the little material that exists on erotomania, Orion discovered that while not all stalkers are erotomaniacs, those who suffer from the delusion that they are loved by their chosen object despite evidence to the contrary are all but incurable. In a psychotic exaggeration of an adolescent crush, these isolated, immature people attach themselves to celebrities and others who represent higher status and authority; far from harmless, they are capable of murder. Orion does an admirable job of conveying the anxiety and outraged helplessness experienced by the victims of this bizarre disorder. Her revulsion for her own stalker, however, seems unilluminated by any spark of compassion, causing the reader to lose sympathy for her; and Orion's failure to allow her stalker's pathology to shed light on the universal need to connect is disappointing. (July)