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The Obsessed
Not yet published
Expected 28 Jul 26"An enthralling, irreverent read." —Ruth Madievsky, bestselling author of All-Night Pharmacy
An endearingly riotous coming-of-age debut from an award-winning translator, about a young woman who maps the love plot of her favorite novel onto her life and finds herself flailing when she gets into a relationship with a fellow literary obsessive.
Astrid is obsessed with the Russian American novelist Sofiya Sova, whose life trajectory serendipitously parallels Astrid’s own and whose writing seems to encompass every anxiety that Astrid has ever had. In hopes of gaining the purpose she so desperately craves, she begins her PhD with the resolve to live off the ethos of Sofiya Sova’s novel.
But when her boyfriend, Charlie, breaks up with her and she meets a fellow Sofiya Sova obsessive named Elijah, Astrid finds herself transcribing the love plot of her favorite novel onto her own life . . . until Elijah begins to pull away and Astrid is left flailing in a life scaffolded by obsession.
A bighearted portrait of the anxieties of desire, The Obsessed explores the trials of modern dating, the strange ennui of academia, and the question of how to create a world for yourself within and without the confines of your influences. What we’re left with is a striking portrayal of how a willing reader can bring a text to life, and similarly the animating power of a good novel.
An endearingly riotous coming-of-age debut from an award-winning translator, about a young woman who maps the love plot of her favorite novel onto her life and finds herself flailing when she gets into a relationship with a fellow literary obsessive.
Astrid is obsessed with the Russian American novelist Sofiya Sova, whose life trajectory serendipitously parallels Astrid’s own and whose writing seems to encompass every anxiety that Astrid has ever had. In hopes of gaining the purpose she so desperately craves, she begins her PhD with the resolve to live off the ethos of Sofiya Sova’s novel.
But when her boyfriend, Charlie, breaks up with her and she meets a fellow Sofiya Sova obsessive named Elijah, Astrid finds herself transcribing the love plot of her favorite novel onto her own life . . . until Elijah begins to pull away and Astrid is left flailing in a life scaffolded by obsession.
A bighearted portrait of the anxieties of desire, The Obsessed explores the trials of modern dating, the strange ennui of academia, and the question of how to create a world for yourself within and without the confines of your influences. What we’re left with is a striking portrayal of how a willing reader can bring a text to life, and similarly the animating power of a good novel.
- GenresAdultFictionContemporary
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Expected publication July 28, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
January 7, 2026
if i get my phd at 25, do i also have to date a 40 year old man or can i skip that part?
November 20, 2025
I wanted to love this. I was into the idea of an obsessive woman main character but ultimately this just wasn’t for me. There really wasn’t any point of the novel I found myself fully engaged and interested. There were many tedious descriptions of college and schoolwork. The main character is pretentious yet shows signs of extreme immaturity which did annoy me at times (◞‸◟；)
Thank you to NetGalley and Putnam for this ARC in exchange for an honest review
Thank you to NetGalley and Putnam for this ARC in exchange for an honest review
November 11, 2025
Not even ten pages in I could tell as an anxious older sister that Astrid’s also the anxious older sister. No one loves being in college because of the up-tight rule following more than an older sister. This maybe resonated a bit TOO much with me, and I was spiraling with Astrid for better or worse.
Thanks so much Putnam Books for this arc!
Thanks so much Putnam Books for this arc!
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
A Novel About Wanting as a Technology: My Review of “The Obsessed” and the Modern Art of the Phantom Buzz
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
In Lizzie Buehler’s debut novel, “The Obsessed,” desire is not a flame so much as an inbox: a bright, compulsive refresh; a phantom buzz; a blue-check confirmation that arrives like absolution and then vanishes into silence. Buehler writes with the calm, overheated clarity of someone who understands that modern longing rarely declares itself in grand gestures. It announces itself in the smallest units of contemporary life – screenshots, WhatsApp threads, the sickening interval between sending a message and deciding whether to answer, the low-grade nausea that accompanies waiting for someone else’s attention to return your body to you.
Astrid Duffy, the novel’s narrator, is a first-year Harvard PhD student in comparative literature – tall, restless, and temperamentally designed to turn coincidence into cosmology. She is also a person for whom the world has become unignorable. Not in the heroic sense: more like the way a soundtrack in a café becomes unbearable once you notice it looping, or the way a room begins to tilt when you realize you have not eaten enough and your brain is burning glucose faster than your appetite can keep up. Astrid’s central affliction is not simply infatuation; it is interpretive hunger. She reads other people, texts, and fictions with the same attentiveness she brings to translation: searching for the hidden system that might explain why one person stays and another withdraws, why a story feels “fated,” why a name reappears in the world like a sign.
Buehler’s slyest move is to offer a premise that sounds, at first, like a contemporary satire of literary obsession: Astrid is fixated on a Russian American novelist, Sofiya Sova, whose work has become her private scripture. Astrid has also become weirdly fascinated by a different Sofiya – a nonfamous woman who shares Sova’s name and seems to echo Astrid in voice, body, and aura. And then, in the way that the internet has trained us to experience as both uncanny and inevitable, the world supplies connective tissue: Astrid meets Elijah, a medical student whose own fixation on Sova’s novel becomes the secret language of their intimacy. The overlap is so improbable it begins to feel scripted. Astrid, who is a scholar by training and a mythmaker by instinct, cannot help but treat the convergence as evidence that the universe is speaking in her direction.
The brilliance of “The Obsessed” is that it never mocks Astrid for believing this. Instead, Buehler shows how such belief becomes a survival tactic in an era that offers too few secular forms of meaning. Astrid’s graduate program is an engine of abstraction. Her peers are brilliant in the way that sometimes feels like self-harm – producing work “no one will ever read,” submitting intellect to professionalized futility. Her friendships are bright but fragile, each one surrounded by the ambient churn of ambition, self-help language, and the soft tyranny of productivity. Her romance with Elijah, by contrast, arrives as a sudden pocket of intensity: a relationship conducted in the stylized cadence of a beloved novel, full of role-play, multilingual flirtation, and the sense that love might be a kind of interpretive partnership. It is not only erotic; it is epistemological. Elijah seems to confirm that literature can still organize a life.
This is a dangerous fantasy, and Buehler understands its danger with an intimacy that feels almost diagnostic. Astrid is the sort of person who can intellectualize herself into paralysis and then call it sensitivity. She is also the sort of person who experiences social life as a series of micro-exposures: should she ask a question at the reading, should she stand in line, should she chase the author out the door, should she reveal her heart in the presence of undergraduates. The book’s comedy is sharp, but it is never detached; it comes from inside the spiral. When Astrid and her friends perform a “stakeout” outside the apartment of the nonfamous Sofiya – cross-referencing Instagram posts, locating a fern behind a gauzy curtain, narrating their sleuthing like amateur detectives – the scene lands as both absurd and instantly legible. It is the kind of behavior a person can rationalize while doing it (“I wouldn’t make her information public. I just want it for myself”) and feel sick about afterward. In an age when surveillance is a hobby and intimacy is a form of data, the line between curiosity and violation is not crossed in one dramatic step. It is crossed in dozens of small justifications.
That incremental moral drift is one of the novel’s most contemporary achievements. “The Obsessed” is not merely about being fixated on a person or a book; it is about the technologies that allow fixation to masquerade as research. Astrid’s mind is trained to locate patterns, to make meaning from fragments. Social media rewards this skill by turning people into archives. A story becomes evidence. A tagged photo becomes a clue. The very tools that claim to connect us also make it easier to live near someone without ever meeting them, to assemble a private portrait of a stranger, to feel a false proximity that intensifies rather than resolves desire. Buehler’s portrait of this condition is especially strong when Astrid describes her sense of splitting in two: one self acting, the other floating above, observing, narrating, waiting for consequences.
The book’s central romance, meanwhile, is a study in asymmetry so recognizable it almost hurts. Astrid and Elijah do not have a dramatic breakup; they have a slow collapse of signal. He stops texting as much. He grows evasive. She rehearses scripts and still cannot speak. Their intimacy becomes a weather system: unpredictable, intermittently electric, full of sudden lulls that Astrid interprets as judgment. What makes the relationship compelling on the page is Buehler’s refusal to flatten Elijah into a villain. He is not cruel so much as unsteady. He is self-reflective, even ethical, and yet his ethics are often deployed in the service of his own freedom rather than hers. When he finally names what is happening – he needs to be “completely single,” he has been jumping between intense relationships, he worries he is promising what he cannot give – the language is gentle, therapist-adjacent, contemporary. It is also, in a way Astrid cannot quite name at first, a kind of power. He gets to frame the narrative. He gets to leave and still claim intimacy as a possibility.
Buehler’s prose shines in these moments of emotional bookkeeping. She is alert to the way modern people talk about feelings as if they are scheduling conflicts, and to the way “boundaries” can become an alibi for inconsistency. Astrid experiences each text like an injection. When Elijah vanishes for twenty-five hours, she notes the number with the precision of someone recording symptoms. When he returns, she collapses not only because she misses him but because the return confirms that she is still tethered. The novel understands something that many love stories miss: the problem is not just that Astrid wants Elijah. The problem is that wanting has become her primary method of feeling alive.
If that were all, “The Obsessed” would be a finely observed campus romance about attachment and modern communication. But Buehler deepens the book by introducing a second axis of desire: the author as oracle. Astrid attends a public conversation with Sofiya Sova and dissociates through the event, furious at the banality of the questions asked by undergraduates, convinced that she is the truer reader. The scene captures the particular arrogance that can coexist with fandom: the belief that identification is proof of special access. When Sova mentions receiving emails from readers who wish they were her character Eva and replies, “Oh no, please don’t do that! Eva is not who you want to be,” Astrid is not merely disappointed. She is destabilized. The line is a rupture in the fantasy that literature can bless your suffering as meaningful.
The novel’s most audacious section arrives when Astrid emails Sofiya Sova and receives a long, thoughtful response – a correspondence Buehler later acknowledges is based on real-life emails with Elif Batuman. In these pages, “The Obsessed” becomes something more than narrative: it becomes an essayistic conversation about Western literature’s romance plots, power structures, and the way women’s disappointment has been aestheticized into a cornerstone of “serious” storytelling. Sova’s reply is generous, sharp, and protective: she admits that her younger self drew meaning from painful relationships and now wishes she had been more careful with her own heart. She recommends Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality,” Valerie Solanas’s “SCUM Manifesto,” and Shulamith Firestone’s “The Dialectic of Sex.” She offers Simone de Beauvoir’s ethical imperative: maximize your own freedom and the freedom of others.
A lesser novel might treat this exchange as a conversion scene, the moment the narrator is rescued by wisdom. Buehler is too smart for that. Astrid cries, prints the emails, tapes them to her wall like talismans, reads “Anna Karenina” as a kind of cosmic thank-you – and still cannot fully relinquish the glamor of suffering. She recognizes, with a quiet and crucial skepticism, that even the author does not have the answers. This ambivalence is one of the book’s triumphs. It refuses the clean arc from obsession to enlightenment, insisting instead that clarity arrives in waves – sometimes through advice, sometimes through humiliation, sometimes through the dull ache of relapse.
Relapse is exactly what the book delivers, with painful realism, when Astrid reunites with Elijah in New York. Their night together is rendered not as triumphant romance but as an exchange haunted by its own impermanence. They do not speak about what has happened; they do not claim it; they touch and then return to distance. The next day Astrid experiences a strange, almost holy emptiness on the subway, a realization that she could go anywhere, that the box was her own creation. It is one of the few moments in the novel that feels genuinely untethered, and it arrives not through a grand decision but through a train stalled in darkness, surrounded by strangers who offer no narrative, only silence.
What makes “The Obsessed” so effective is its willingness to treat obsession as both pathology and artistry. Astrid’s compulsion to connect dots is also her talent. She notices what others ignore. She gives the world texture. She is, in some sense, the ideal citizen of the internet age: a person who can turn fragments into story. The novel does not ask her to stop being this person. It asks her to recognize the cost of turning living people into symbols. Elijah is not the ideal man; he is a man. Sofiya is not a mirror; she is a person with her own life. Sofiya Sova is not a prophet; she is an older version of a younger self who also mistook pain for meaning.
The book’s closing movement is unexpectedly generous. Astrid finds her old journal entry about the “ideal man” and realizes it no longer fits; the journal feels like an expired fashion magazine, full of predictions that never came true. She does not burn it in a grand gesture. She shelves it. She decides to go for a walk for no reason other than to see the world. And then, at the moment when narrative would normally provide a payoff – the nonfamous Sofiya finally responds and agrees to coffee – the novel refuses to lunge. “This was what I had wanted, right?” Astrid thinks. The final line is an antidote to compulsion: she will think about how to reply later.
That restraint is the book’s most sophisticated moral choice. In a culture that monetizes immediacy, “later” becomes a kind of freedom.
Buehler’s literary lineage is visible, but she has her own tonal signature: the crisp observational intelligence of “The Idiot,” the millennial interiority of “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” the anxious pattern-making of “Fake Accounts,” the social media ethnography of “No One Is Talking About This,” the academic self-satire of “Disorientation,” the philosophical romantic comedy of “Trick Mirror”–adjacent essay-thought, and the old Russian shadow texts that hover like an inheritance you cannot fully reject. Yet “The Obsessed” is not merely a book of references. It is a novel that understands how the present feels: the way the private self is always half-public, the way therapy language becomes flirtation, the way identity is built from texts, the way politics, climate dread, and institutional decay seep into romance as a background hum.
If the book has a limitation, it is the one that haunts many novels of consciousness: at times, its brilliance risks becoming too self-aware, too neatly interpretive. But even that flaw feels thematically appropriate. Astrid’s problem is not a lack of insight. It is an excess of it, untethered from a life that can hold it.
And yet Buehler gives her narrator something better than a cure: a shift in posture. “The Obsessed” does not claim that obsession disappears. It suggests that, with time, it can be metabolized into knowledge – and that knowledge can become the beginning of a life not organized around waiting for someone else’s reply.
For its unnervingly accurate portrayal of contemporary longing, its formal intelligence, its ethical seriousness, and its ability to be funny without being cruel, I would rate “The Obsessed” an 88 out of 100.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
In Lizzie Buehler’s debut novel, “The Obsessed,” desire is not a flame so much as an inbox: a bright, compulsive refresh; a phantom buzz; a blue-check confirmation that arrives like absolution and then vanishes into silence. Buehler writes with the calm, overheated clarity of someone who understands that modern longing rarely declares itself in grand gestures. It announces itself in the smallest units of contemporary life – screenshots, WhatsApp threads, the sickening interval between sending a message and deciding whether to answer, the low-grade nausea that accompanies waiting for someone else’s attention to return your body to you.
Astrid Duffy, the novel’s narrator, is a first-year Harvard PhD student in comparative literature – tall, restless, and temperamentally designed to turn coincidence into cosmology. She is also a person for whom the world has become unignorable. Not in the heroic sense: more like the way a soundtrack in a café becomes unbearable once you notice it looping, or the way a room begins to tilt when you realize you have not eaten enough and your brain is burning glucose faster than your appetite can keep up. Astrid’s central affliction is not simply infatuation; it is interpretive hunger. She reads other people, texts, and fictions with the same attentiveness she brings to translation: searching for the hidden system that might explain why one person stays and another withdraws, why a story feels “fated,” why a name reappears in the world like a sign.
Buehler’s slyest move is to offer a premise that sounds, at first, like a contemporary satire of literary obsession: Astrid is fixated on a Russian American novelist, Sofiya Sova, whose work has become her private scripture. Astrid has also become weirdly fascinated by a different Sofiya – a nonfamous woman who shares Sova’s name and seems to echo Astrid in voice, body, and aura. And then, in the way that the internet has trained us to experience as both uncanny and inevitable, the world supplies connective tissue: Astrid meets Elijah, a medical student whose own fixation on Sova’s novel becomes the secret language of their intimacy. The overlap is so improbable it begins to feel scripted. Astrid, who is a scholar by training and a mythmaker by instinct, cannot help but treat the convergence as evidence that the universe is speaking in her direction.
The brilliance of “The Obsessed” is that it never mocks Astrid for believing this. Instead, Buehler shows how such belief becomes a survival tactic in an era that offers too few secular forms of meaning. Astrid’s graduate program is an engine of abstraction. Her peers are brilliant in the way that sometimes feels like self-harm – producing work “no one will ever read,” submitting intellect to professionalized futility. Her friendships are bright but fragile, each one surrounded by the ambient churn of ambition, self-help language, and the soft tyranny of productivity. Her romance with Elijah, by contrast, arrives as a sudden pocket of intensity: a relationship conducted in the stylized cadence of a beloved novel, full of role-play, multilingual flirtation, and the sense that love might be a kind of interpretive partnership. It is not only erotic; it is epistemological. Elijah seems to confirm that literature can still organize a life.
This is a dangerous fantasy, and Buehler understands its danger with an intimacy that feels almost diagnostic. Astrid is the sort of person who can intellectualize herself into paralysis and then call it sensitivity. She is also the sort of person who experiences social life as a series of micro-exposures: should she ask a question at the reading, should she stand in line, should she chase the author out the door, should she reveal her heart in the presence of undergraduates. The book’s comedy is sharp, but it is never detached; it comes from inside the spiral. When Astrid and her friends perform a “stakeout” outside the apartment of the nonfamous Sofiya – cross-referencing Instagram posts, locating a fern behind a gauzy curtain, narrating their sleuthing like amateur detectives – the scene lands as both absurd and instantly legible. It is the kind of behavior a person can rationalize while doing it (“I wouldn’t make her information public. I just want it for myself”) and feel sick about afterward. In an age when surveillance is a hobby and intimacy is a form of data, the line between curiosity and violation is not crossed in one dramatic step. It is crossed in dozens of small justifications.
That incremental moral drift is one of the novel’s most contemporary achievements. “The Obsessed” is not merely about being fixated on a person or a book; it is about the technologies that allow fixation to masquerade as research. Astrid’s mind is trained to locate patterns, to make meaning from fragments. Social media rewards this skill by turning people into archives. A story becomes evidence. A tagged photo becomes a clue. The very tools that claim to connect us also make it easier to live near someone without ever meeting them, to assemble a private portrait of a stranger, to feel a false proximity that intensifies rather than resolves desire. Buehler’s portrait of this condition is especially strong when Astrid describes her sense of splitting in two: one self acting, the other floating above, observing, narrating, waiting for consequences.
The book’s central romance, meanwhile, is a study in asymmetry so recognizable it almost hurts. Astrid and Elijah do not have a dramatic breakup; they have a slow collapse of signal. He stops texting as much. He grows evasive. She rehearses scripts and still cannot speak. Their intimacy becomes a weather system: unpredictable, intermittently electric, full of sudden lulls that Astrid interprets as judgment. What makes the relationship compelling on the page is Buehler’s refusal to flatten Elijah into a villain. He is not cruel so much as unsteady. He is self-reflective, even ethical, and yet his ethics are often deployed in the service of his own freedom rather than hers. When he finally names what is happening – he needs to be “completely single,” he has been jumping between intense relationships, he worries he is promising what he cannot give – the language is gentle, therapist-adjacent, contemporary. It is also, in a way Astrid cannot quite name at first, a kind of power. He gets to frame the narrative. He gets to leave and still claim intimacy as a possibility.
Buehler’s prose shines in these moments of emotional bookkeeping. She is alert to the way modern people talk about feelings as if they are scheduling conflicts, and to the way “boundaries” can become an alibi for inconsistency. Astrid experiences each text like an injection. When Elijah vanishes for twenty-five hours, she notes the number with the precision of someone recording symptoms. When he returns, she collapses not only because she misses him but because the return confirms that she is still tethered. The novel understands something that many love stories miss: the problem is not just that Astrid wants Elijah. The problem is that wanting has become her primary method of feeling alive.
If that were all, “The Obsessed” would be a finely observed campus romance about attachment and modern communication. But Buehler deepens the book by introducing a second axis of desire: the author as oracle. Astrid attends a public conversation with Sofiya Sova and dissociates through the event, furious at the banality of the questions asked by undergraduates, convinced that she is the truer reader. The scene captures the particular arrogance that can coexist with fandom: the belief that identification is proof of special access. When Sova mentions receiving emails from readers who wish they were her character Eva and replies, “Oh no, please don’t do that! Eva is not who you want to be,” Astrid is not merely disappointed. She is destabilized. The line is a rupture in the fantasy that literature can bless your suffering as meaningful.
The novel’s most audacious section arrives when Astrid emails Sofiya Sova and receives a long, thoughtful response – a correspondence Buehler later acknowledges is based on real-life emails with Elif Batuman. In these pages, “The Obsessed” becomes something more than narrative: it becomes an essayistic conversation about Western literature’s romance plots, power structures, and the way women’s disappointment has been aestheticized into a cornerstone of “serious” storytelling. Sova’s reply is generous, sharp, and protective: she admits that her younger self drew meaning from painful relationships and now wishes she had been more careful with her own heart. She recommends Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality,” Valerie Solanas’s “SCUM Manifesto,” and Shulamith Firestone’s “The Dialectic of Sex.” She offers Simone de Beauvoir’s ethical imperative: maximize your own freedom and the freedom of others.
A lesser novel might treat this exchange as a conversion scene, the moment the narrator is rescued by wisdom. Buehler is too smart for that. Astrid cries, prints the emails, tapes them to her wall like talismans, reads “Anna Karenina” as a kind of cosmic thank-you – and still cannot fully relinquish the glamor of suffering. She recognizes, with a quiet and crucial skepticism, that even the author does not have the answers. This ambivalence is one of the book’s triumphs. It refuses the clean arc from obsession to enlightenment, insisting instead that clarity arrives in waves – sometimes through advice, sometimes through humiliation, sometimes through the dull ache of relapse.
Relapse is exactly what the book delivers, with painful realism, when Astrid reunites with Elijah in New York. Their night together is rendered not as triumphant romance but as an exchange haunted by its own impermanence. They do not speak about what has happened; they do not claim it; they touch and then return to distance. The next day Astrid experiences a strange, almost holy emptiness on the subway, a realization that she could go anywhere, that the box was her own creation. It is one of the few moments in the novel that feels genuinely untethered, and it arrives not through a grand decision but through a train stalled in darkness, surrounded by strangers who offer no narrative, only silence.
What makes “The Obsessed” so effective is its willingness to treat obsession as both pathology and artistry. Astrid’s compulsion to connect dots is also her talent. She notices what others ignore. She gives the world texture. She is, in some sense, the ideal citizen of the internet age: a person who can turn fragments into story. The novel does not ask her to stop being this person. It asks her to recognize the cost of turning living people into symbols. Elijah is not the ideal man; he is a man. Sofiya is not a mirror; she is a person with her own life. Sofiya Sova is not a prophet; she is an older version of a younger self who also mistook pain for meaning.
The book’s closing movement is unexpectedly generous. Astrid finds her old journal entry about the “ideal man” and realizes it no longer fits; the journal feels like an expired fashion magazine, full of predictions that never came true. She does not burn it in a grand gesture. She shelves it. She decides to go for a walk for no reason other than to see the world. And then, at the moment when narrative would normally provide a payoff – the nonfamous Sofiya finally responds and agrees to coffee – the novel refuses to lunge. “This was what I had wanted, right?” Astrid thinks. The final line is an antidote to compulsion: she will think about how to reply later.
That restraint is the book’s most sophisticated moral choice. In a culture that monetizes immediacy, “later” becomes a kind of freedom.
Buehler’s literary lineage is visible, but she has her own tonal signature: the crisp observational intelligence of “The Idiot,” the millennial interiority of “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” the anxious pattern-making of “Fake Accounts,” the social media ethnography of “No One Is Talking About This,” the academic self-satire of “Disorientation,” the philosophical romantic comedy of “Trick Mirror”–adjacent essay-thought, and the old Russian shadow texts that hover like an inheritance you cannot fully reject. Yet “The Obsessed” is not merely a book of references. It is a novel that understands how the present feels: the way the private self is always half-public, the way therapy language becomes flirtation, the way identity is built from texts, the way politics, climate dread, and institutional decay seep into romance as a background hum.
If the book has a limitation, it is the one that haunts many novels of consciousness: at times, its brilliance risks becoming too self-aware, too neatly interpretive. But even that flaw feels thematically appropriate. Astrid’s problem is not a lack of insight. It is an excess of it, untethered from a life that can hold it.
And yet Buehler gives her narrator something better than a cure: a shift in posture. “The Obsessed” does not claim that obsession disappears. It suggests that, with time, it can be metabolized into knowledge – and that knowledge can become the beginning of a life not organized around waiting for someone else’s reply.
For its unnervingly accurate portrayal of contemporary longing, its formal intelligence, its ethical seriousness, and its ability to be funny without being cruel, I would rate “The Obsessed” an 88 out of 100.
December 12, 2025
Great prose and descriptions of life within the same vein of writers like Elif Batuman (which the author herself proclaims to be someone of great inspiration to her and even bases correspondence within the novel off her own interactions with Batuman), but ultimately this ended up being an underwhelming ready. It's always interesting to me how much authors insert of themselves into their own writing, and while reading this novel I could not stop thinking about how much of the novel I felt was a self-insert of the author. Buehler does a good job at describing lived experiences, and through the perspective of a character that has obsessive tendencies, but that's about it. The narrative was about as listless as the protagonist herself and there was no real payoff by the end of the novel.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this e-arc in exchange for an honest review.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this e-arc in exchange for an honest review.
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
this is one of those novels that quietly sneaks up on you and then hits uncomfortably close to home.
i'm amazed how accurately Buehler captures the inner life of someone who loves through ideas first. Astrid is less interested in surface attraction than in what people think, read, and believe. her tendency to obsess is to research, to scroll, to believe that knowing about someone is the same as knowing them. that felt painfully familiar. the novel understands how easily shared taste can be mistaken for emotional compatibility, and how devastating it can be to learn otherwise.
at the same time, the story isn’t bleak. Astrid’s close-knit friend group provides warmth and grounding, offering a tender counterbalance to her romantic uncertainty. their friendship is one of the book’s quiet strengths, reminding readers that support and intimacy don’t only exist in romantic forms.
this is not a plot-driven novel, nor is it interested in dramatic reveals. instead, it excels at portraying the slow, disorienting realisation that obsession can hollow out rather than fulfil, and that influence can only take you so far before you have to decide who you are on your own terms.
reading The Obsessed felt like holding up a mirror: uncomfortable at times, but ultimately clarifying. It’s a novel that invites reflection, especially for readers who have ever confused intensity with connection, or longing with love.
--------
to-read:
i'll never get tired of stories about obsessive women. i just know there'll be a lot of quote-worthy lines for me.
*thank you to G.P. Putnam's Sons for the ARC*
i'm amazed how accurately Buehler captures the inner life of someone who loves through ideas first. Astrid is less interested in surface attraction than in what people think, read, and believe. her tendency to obsess is to research, to scroll, to believe that knowing about someone is the same as knowing them. that felt painfully familiar. the novel understands how easily shared taste can be mistaken for emotional compatibility, and how devastating it can be to learn otherwise.
at the same time, the story isn’t bleak. Astrid’s close-knit friend group provides warmth and grounding, offering a tender counterbalance to her romantic uncertainty. their friendship is one of the book’s quiet strengths, reminding readers that support and intimacy don’t only exist in romantic forms.
this is not a plot-driven novel, nor is it interested in dramatic reveals. instead, it excels at portraying the slow, disorienting realisation that obsession can hollow out rather than fulfil, and that influence can only take you so far before you have to decide who you are on your own terms.
reading The Obsessed felt like holding up a mirror: uncomfortable at times, but ultimately clarifying. It’s a novel that invites reflection, especially for readers who have ever confused intensity with connection, or longing with love.
--------
to-read:
i'll never get tired of stories about obsessive women. i just know there'll be a lot of quote-worthy lines for me.
*thank you to G.P. Putnam's Sons for the ARC*
December 8, 2025
Thanks to Netgalley & Putnam for the ARC!
Lizzie Buehler’s The Obsessed is a book that is too real for its own good, so measured in its depiction of lived experience that it fails to have much of a perspective.
Over the past few years, there’s been a glut of autofiction that overestimates the relevance of academia. If I misinterpret a literary theorist, I won't have to have an opinion. The average reader won't know any better. Even so, I often enjoy how authors slyly interrogate the absurdity of the institution and their place in it, using novelistic form to heighten every competing voice. Whether The Obsessed truly fits the genre is up for debate, but its passive protagonist sounds a whole lot like Lizzie Buehler: She attends an Ivy League. She studies comparative lit. She’s a translator. That last point in particular feels crucial to making sense of why this book doesn’t click.
Broadly speaking, translations favor word-for-word literalism or more contextualized interpretation, and The Obsessed feels defined by the former. While this is original work, it feels so committed to “fact” that it loses any sense of truth. It’s just a bunch of events happening to someone who doesn't have the interiority to engage with them. Every time the narrator invokes an academic touchstone like Wittgenstein or Byung-Chul Han, it’s with the performative familiarity of a graduate student. The problem with the novel being in first person is that it becomes almost impossible to parse whether Astrid is a boring character or Buehler is a boring writer. If there was more tonal definition, it might feel like there’s some substance behind the superficiality, but Buehler’s writing is detached to the point of apathy. Without a sense of authorial opinion, the book’s title feels ironic, but there’s no evidence of reflection that would motivate irony.
I mean, the book’s culminating revelation is itself a cliché: “I was more in love with my narratives about *character names* than with the people themselves.”
Overall, The Obsessed is a frustrating read because there are moments where it feels like Buehler is capable of more. There’s a character referred to only as “MIT Boy,” and across a series of text exchanges and a short story, his voice emerges with such a gratingly wooden specificity that one wonders why the other characters don’t get the same treatment. They need the same level of caricature to make sense on the page. It feels equally telling and unfortunate that the only other interesting conversation—between the protagonist and her favorite author—is lifted almost wholesale from an email that Elif Batuman sent to Lizzie Buehler. The only moment of genuine perspective in the book essentially occurs outside of it.
It’s hard to say whether the novel’s issue is in depicting mundanity or failing to interpret it, but either way, there’s not really enough here to pique one’s interest. Early in the story, the protagonist suggests that there are too many unnecessary books in the world. The Obsessed is a regrettably compelling argument in her favor.
Lizzie Buehler’s The Obsessed is a book that is too real for its own good, so measured in its depiction of lived experience that it fails to have much of a perspective.
Over the past few years, there’s been a glut of autofiction that overestimates the relevance of academia. If I misinterpret a literary theorist, I won't have to have an opinion. The average reader won't know any better. Even so, I often enjoy how authors slyly interrogate the absurdity of the institution and their place in it, using novelistic form to heighten every competing voice. Whether The Obsessed truly fits the genre is up for debate, but its passive protagonist sounds a whole lot like Lizzie Buehler: She attends an Ivy League. She studies comparative lit. She’s a translator. That last point in particular feels crucial to making sense of why this book doesn’t click.
Broadly speaking, translations favor word-for-word literalism or more contextualized interpretation, and The Obsessed feels defined by the former. While this is original work, it feels so committed to “fact” that it loses any sense of truth. It’s just a bunch of events happening to someone who doesn't have the interiority to engage with them. Every time the narrator invokes an academic touchstone like Wittgenstein or Byung-Chul Han, it’s with the performative familiarity of a graduate student. The problem with the novel being in first person is that it becomes almost impossible to parse whether Astrid is a boring character or Buehler is a boring writer. If there was more tonal definition, it might feel like there’s some substance behind the superficiality, but Buehler’s writing is detached to the point of apathy. Without a sense of authorial opinion, the book’s title feels ironic, but there’s no evidence of reflection that would motivate irony.
I mean, the book’s culminating revelation is itself a cliché: “I was more in love with my narratives about *character names* than with the people themselves.”
Overall, The Obsessed is a frustrating read because there are moments where it feels like Buehler is capable of more. There’s a character referred to only as “MIT Boy,” and across a series of text exchanges and a short story, his voice emerges with such a gratingly wooden specificity that one wonders why the other characters don’t get the same treatment. They need the same level of caricature to make sense on the page. It feels equally telling and unfortunate that the only other interesting conversation—between the protagonist and her favorite author—is lifted almost wholesale from an email that Elif Batuman sent to Lizzie Buehler. The only moment of genuine perspective in the book essentially occurs outside of it.
It’s hard to say whether the novel’s issue is in depicting mundanity or failing to interpret it, but either way, there’s not really enough here to pique one’s interest. Early in the story, the protagonist suggests that there are too many unnecessary books in the world. The Obsessed is a regrettably compelling argument in her favor.
November 23, 2025
Having loved The Idiot by Elif Batuman, I was excited to read this book that captured a similar writing style, topic, and tone. Reading the acknowledgements and hearing of the extent of Batuman’s influence and how it mirrored the events of the novel was satisfying! I went into this book expecting the protagonist’s fixation on the Sofiya the author but not Sofiya the ex of her ex. One of those obsessions was generally more important to the plot, especially as her life mirrored Sofiya Sova’s novel. I loved the writing style and the consistent tone and personality given to Astrid. Her academic pursuits and her uncertainty as she pursued them offered nuance to her character. I also liked that her obsessions and mental health struggles didn’t keep her from having meaningful, lasting friendships throughout the novel (outside her romantic relationships). I would recommend this book to anyone who likes literary fiction and literature!
Thank you Putnam Books for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
Thank you Putnam Books for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
December 28, 2025
Thank you to netgalley for the arc!
I really enjoyed this book! I loved being inside the main character’s head, the narration was immersive so I felt like I was living her life right alongside her. I also appreciated that the story wasn’t only focused on the main plot. We get glimpses into her schoolwork and translation projects, and even though I know nothing about that field, it was surprisingly engaging. It reminded me why I love reading: getting to learn about things totally outside my own world.
The main character herself was incredibly relatable (sometimes uncomfortably so lol) Her emotional reactions, frustrations, and insecurities all felt real and human. The supporting cast was strong as well! the side characters and friendships added depth without stealing the spotlight.
The pacing was great: scenes moved naturally, nothing felt dragged. I also really enjoyed the writing style and would happily read more from this author in the future.
Overall, a thoughtful, grounded, and engaging read that kept me invested from start to finish.
I really enjoyed this book! I loved being inside the main character’s head, the narration was immersive so I felt like I was living her life right alongside her. I also appreciated that the story wasn’t only focused on the main plot. We get glimpses into her schoolwork and translation projects, and even though I know nothing about that field, it was surprisingly engaging. It reminded me why I love reading: getting to learn about things totally outside my own world.
The main character herself was incredibly relatable (sometimes uncomfortably so lol) Her emotional reactions, frustrations, and insecurities all felt real and human. The supporting cast was strong as well! the side characters and friendships added depth without stealing the spotlight.
The pacing was great: scenes moved naturally, nothing felt dragged. I also really enjoyed the writing style and would happily read more from this author in the future.
Overall, a thoughtful, grounded, and engaging read that kept me invested from start to finish.
January 20, 2026
This novel is extremely well written fan fiction about Elif Batuman. It becomes more than that, but there is a definite fan fiction thread. But doesn’t a lot of literature have a bit of this? Part of why I liked the novel is its transportive. It captures the aimlessness of being a grad student well. The paper or the romantic interest—honestly can we say with any confidence which is more important to worry about; are the skills for one the same as for the other? In a particularly good chapter, Buehler suggests romance and academia are basically one and the same. I’m a fan of this theory.
While Batuman’s writing feels intense and academic, Buehler plays with WhatsApp themes more than kiekergard or whatever so the Onsessed is lighter and more accessible. The novel is very good at excavating the awkward social interactions and the academic nihilism of graduate school. Fans of The Idiot will love the intertextuality and the ways it deals with similar themes about grad school.
While Batuman’s writing feels intense and academic, Buehler plays with WhatsApp themes more than kiekergard or whatever so the Onsessed is lighter and more accessible. The novel is very good at excavating the awkward social interactions and the academic nihilism of graduate school. Fans of The Idiot will love the intertextuality and the ways it deals with similar themes about grad school.
November 11, 2025
Thanks to Netgalley and Putnam for the ebook. Astrid has moved to Harvard to start a PhD program, but her long term boyfriend has just moved to Japan. The long distance relationship quickly fails, leaving Astrid with a light study schedule and too much time to obsess over a small circle of coincidences. Astrid starts dating a medical student, Elijah, who’s at Yale. One reason for the attraction is that they are both obsessed with a fiction writer named Sofiya Sova. Astrid feels that she is living the life of the lead character in her novel. Astrid is also obsessed with her ex boyfriend’s ex girlfriend also named Sofiya. Things become slightly surreal when she finds out that Elijah also used to date her. These neurotic spins keep Astrid from having to think about the life she really wants, until finally she can’t escape it any longer.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC of The Obsessed by Lizzie Buehler!
The Obsessed by Lizzie Buehler had a lot of promise, but unfortunately it did not fully deliver for me. I went in expecting something more unsettling and strange, similar to the offbeat, deeply odd characters found in Sayaka Murata’s work. Instead, the story centers on a girl who is obsessed with an author and with her ex’s ex, who happens to share the same name as the author.
The obsession itself felt fairly mild and self-aware, which made it less compelling. Because the main character understands her fixation so clearly, it never crosses into territory that feels disturbing or intriguing enough to carry an entire book. While the writing was solid and engaging enough to keep me from DNFing, the story ultimately felt underdeveloped and lacking the depth I was hoping for.
The Obsessed by Lizzie Buehler had a lot of promise, but unfortunately it did not fully deliver for me. I went in expecting something more unsettling and strange, similar to the offbeat, deeply odd characters found in Sayaka Murata’s work. Instead, the story centers on a girl who is obsessed with an author and with her ex’s ex, who happens to share the same name as the author.
The obsession itself felt fairly mild and self-aware, which made it less compelling. Because the main character understands her fixation so clearly, it never crosses into territory that feels disturbing or intriguing enough to carry an entire book. While the writing was solid and engaging enough to keep me from DNFing, the story ultimately felt underdeveloped and lacking the depth I was hoping for.
November 30, 2025
4.5 stars! Desire and academia are two components that compose The Obsessed. These two themes are ones I am drawn to, so if you are also, I highly recommend this read! It was done incredibly well and accurately. Even if the obsession component seems overbearing at times, there's definitely truth in it.
Elif Batuman has written one of my favorite novels, and Lizzie Buehler is very reminiscent of the writing style! It is witty and sophisticated, and I loved every second of reading it. When reading the author's note, I saw that some of the book was based on the author's interaction with Elif Batuman, and it all clicked!
Thank you NetGalley, G.P. Putnam's Sons, & Lizzie Buehler for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. The Obsessed is released on July 28, 2026!
Elif Batuman has written one of my favorite novels, and Lizzie Buehler is very reminiscent of the writing style! It is witty and sophisticated, and I loved every second of reading it. When reading the author's note, I saw that some of the book was based on the author's interaction with Elif Batuman, and it all clicked!
Thank you NetGalley, G.P. Putnam's Sons, & Lizzie Buehler for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. The Obsessed is released on July 28, 2026!
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I really connected with the main character in regards to her anxiety and social awkwardness. That was really well written. I enjoyed the storyline and her character growth throughout the book. I do have to say that a lot of the literature and translation references went way over my head and a couple of times as Astrid was deeply explaining something, my eyes glazed over because I didn't understand it at all. Overall, I think this is a great book of learning to trust yourself and maybe a little deep dive into the realm of obsessions and how they manifest in people. I don't think that I have ever read a book about a character who has been obsessed with 2 people she doesn't know before. I really enjoyed this book!
Thanks to NetGalley and Putnam for this advanced reader copy.
Thanks to NetGalley and Putnam for this advanced reader copy.
November 11, 2025
I had a really good time reading this book. It’s a nice blend of two of my favorite elements of literary fiction- academia and an obsessed female main character. I loved reading about these pretentious, casually insane grad students, and I found Astrid, the FMC, to be a very funny and appropriately cringey narrator. Boy, does that girl need a joint and an SLAA meeting, but so did I ten years ago when I was a lot like her. I found it to be very healing in a strange way, and I think this is a book that will do numbers with the OCD girlies.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!
November 20, 2025
Astrid is obsessed with two Sofiyas-one Sofiya is her favorite author and the other Sofiya is her boyfriend's ex-girlfriend. When she sees a piece of mail addressed to Sofiya (the ex's ex) in her mailbox, she becomes determined to run into her. During this quest, she also becomes increasingly infatuated by another person that used to date Sofiya though she can't quite figure out whether he wants a relationship.
I enjoyed Astrid's point of view and her musings and the ending is perfect. It seems like things are very grim in the graduate school dating scene!
Thank you to Putnam and NetGalley for the opportunity to read a copy.
I enjoyed Astrid's point of view and her musings and the ending is perfect. It seems like things are very grim in the graduate school dating scene!
Thank you to Putnam and NetGalley for the opportunity to read a copy.
November 18, 2025
4
setting: Massachusetts
rep: n/a
two of my favorite things to read are books about academia and books about obsessive women so this was an auto-request - also, love that cover! Astrid was a great protagonist and I enjoyed a lot of the intellectual conversations, and the weirdness of her initial texts with Elijah. I kind of wanted her to be weirder and more obsessive to be honest! all in all, she seemed like a pretty regular (within reasonable limits of oddness) person. I enjoyed this and will keep an eye out for the author!
setting: Massachusetts
rep: n/a
two of my favorite things to read are books about academia and books about obsessive women so this was an auto-request - also, love that cover! Astrid was a great protagonist and I enjoyed a lot of the intellectual conversations, and the weirdness of her initial texts with Elijah. I kind of wanted her to be weirder and more obsessive to be honest! all in all, she seemed like a pretty regular (within reasonable limits of oddness) person. I enjoyed this and will keep an eye out for the author!
December 2, 2025
This was an interesting read. A fascinating writing style linguistically. I was on the beautiful line of tottering between rooting for Astrid and being scared of what her next move could be. Ultimately I feel satisfied, but since this book feels so much like real life, there was also that little bit of a cliffhanger that exists from simply being part of the human experience. I am thankful to the publisher, who provided the ARC, and the author, for sharing her art. I leave this review freely and willingly as a recipient of the ARC.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
The title of this book is so fitting to the story. I felt Astrid's obsession throughout the story as if I was living it myself.
Loved Buehler's writing style and I can't wait to read her future work.
Read this!
Thank you to Putnam and the author for providing a free copy of this book through NetGalley.
Loved Buehler's writing style and I can't wait to read her future work.
Read this!
Thank you to Putnam and the author for providing a free copy of this book through NetGalley.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
The Obsessed is a coming-of-age story following a messy fmc, perfect for fans of Odessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney. The continual literary thread throughout was a great connection. This is the book for post-grad students and anyone flailing in life.
Thank you to the publisher for the e-copy. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
Thank you to the publisher for the e-copy. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
December 12, 2025
Astrid is such a huge fan of the work of Sofiya Sova that her love frequently feels obsessive. Her own personal and academic life is starting to show a striking resemblance to the author's work and Astrid decides to do this purposely. Oddly enough, Astrid also finds similarities between her life and another Sofiya, a woman whose life hangs in an oddly close orbit to Astrid's and the curiosity spirals into obsession here also. Astrid struggles to make sense of her grad school experience and personal life through the lens of Sofiya Sova's work while fueling a strange interest in the other Sofiya as well.
This book was light on the plot but heavy on vibes in the best way possible. Astrid's obsession and anxiety were portrayed in a way that I couldn't help but be driven through the story. I usually steer clear of books with too much mention of current day things but I was surprised how well the author's use of text threads was utilized here. There's one point in the book where Astrid is ignoring everyone at a party and is completely immersed in her obsessive need to check and send text messages and if you've ever done that in real life that's exactly what this book felt like. The plot unfolds in a meandering chaotic way that suits a young person trying to find their footing and direction in the world. I enjoyed the pacing throughout the book with the exception that right before the conclusion unfolded I felt it was a little disjointed or rushed to get to the ending. Maybe because the story felt a little out in the weeds (complementary) for a minute that circling back to the main idea felt a little too sudden. The conclusion itself was enjoyable and tied up the book nicely.
As someone who's been known to love a tale about an unhinged woman, I will be recommending this one.
Thanks to Net Galley, Putnam Books, and the author for the opportunity to read and review the book. All opinions are my own.
This book was light on the plot but heavy on vibes in the best way possible. Astrid's obsession and anxiety were portrayed in a way that I couldn't help but be driven through the story. I usually steer clear of books with too much mention of current day things but I was surprised how well the author's use of text threads was utilized here. There's one point in the book where Astrid is ignoring everyone at a party and is completely immersed in her obsessive need to check and send text messages and if you've ever done that in real life that's exactly what this book felt like. The plot unfolds in a meandering chaotic way that suits a young person trying to find their footing and direction in the world. I enjoyed the pacing throughout the book with the exception that right before the conclusion unfolded I felt it was a little disjointed or rushed to get to the ending. Maybe because the story felt a little out in the weeds (complementary) for a minute that circling back to the main idea felt a little too sudden. The conclusion itself was enjoyable and tied up the book nicely.
As someone who's been known to love a tale about an unhinged woman, I will be recommending this one.
Thanks to Net Galley, Putnam Books, and the author for the opportunity to read and review the book. All opinions are my own.
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