Published by Girls Can on 12 Mar 2019
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Amanda Loeb is a single, intelligent New York City attorney coming up on the eve of her thirtieth birthday. With a stable job, circle of supportive friends, and close relationships with her mother and sister, one detail sets Amanda apart from others--she is a hypochondriac. Her medicine cabinet is home to a stock of medications sourced from an actively managed A-Z list of the best doctors in NYC. When Amanda meets Brian Marshall, a handsome and charismatic restaurant owner, her heart beats in undiagnosable somersaults. As their relationship develops Amanda learns the intricacies and complications love brings may be the cure-all "pill" she needs to free herself from the affliction--for the rest of her life.
Amanda is a hypochondriac, and she's on a quest to fix her frigidity problem. The premise seemed fun and silly--the perfect summer rom com--and I thought the title was a fun play on Crazy, Stupid, Love (whether or not that was intentional, I don't know). I even imagined my own version of the story based off the title, in which a hypochondriac experiences love but doesn't realise it and comically explains away the symptoms with diseases until she finally realises she's in love, but that's beside the point.
Don't send me flowers, unless I'm dead. And don't look at this as some sort of lack of gratitude (although it may look that way), but how can I thank anyone who sends a biological weapon into my house? That's not a present. It's an attempt on my life! Flowers are like bombs to my immunological system, triggering a very serious allergic reaction in me. No one can imagine how I feel. It's more or less like this: flowers give off pollen, a cloud of almost invisible dust that floats about the air. Well, that pollen gets stuck in my throat, attacks my bronchial tract, causing an inflammation in my airways, and I begin to suffocate. A few minutes later, if I don't get immediate attention, I could become just another cadaver among the statistics. Now tell me. Is that a present to send someone?
Reading about Amanda's hypochondria was entertaining at first (I mean, I'm not the biggest fan of flowers either), but it gradually got tedious and verged on narcissistic. In my opinion, she more likely had Munchausen than hypochondria. Almost every chapter was a new health scare, and not only that, but they were mostly isolated incidents that didn't affect the plot or her character development. (The first three chapters were all about hypochondria, and the fourth one was about getting a bikini wax!)
I had trouble sympathising with Amanda because her health scares felt more about proving herself right than about alleviating a real scare. It didn't even seem like her own mother had sympathy for her. Amanda was a catastrophiser, and maybe that's insensitive of me to say as I have no idea what it's like to be a hypochondriac, but I think a way to create more empathy for this character would be to highlight her anxiety surrounding her health scares instead of playing the name game (and if the name game is truly essential to the condition, then also highlight her anxiety instead of just playing the name game).
My Crazy (Sick) Love kinda reminded me of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman, as they both have socially odd protagonists with strange romantic endeavors.
