July 20, 2026
Provided Images/Penguin Random House
Lizzie Buehler, a third-year medical student at Temple University, will release her debut novel 'The Obsessed' on Tuesday, July 28.
In her upcoming book "The Obsessed," Philly author Lizzie Buehler dives into the art of infatuation — something that she's often struggled with in her own life.
"I've always been a very obsessive person myself," Buehler said. "Sometimes in a good way, and sometimes in a bad way. I have a tendency to get really excited about things and go into them very wholeheartedly, which can be good because it means that I'm not afraid to do things that are kind of crazy, like decide to drop out of a Ph.D. program and do something else that is better suited for me. But on the flip side, I think that it can lead to me really overthinking interactions with people, assigning meaning to things that maybe don't have that much meaning."
Buehler, a third-year medical student at Temple University, will soon get to add published author to her résumé when her debut novel is released Tuesday, July 28. The book follows Astrid, a Ph.D. student studying languages and translation at an Ivy League university, who also happens to be obsessed with her boyfriend's ex, Sofiya, and a local novelist by the same name.
Like Astrid, Buehler also worked as a translator and was a Ph.D. student in 2020. But she quickly realized that it wasn't for her and started turning to books to try to figure out her next path. She also started writing down some of what was going on around her as a coping mechanism, although she tried to make it a little more humorous than real life.
"(Academia) is just such a very specific world and culture, and I thought a lot of the things were very absurd, and so I just started writing down things that I saw," Buehler said. "Then maybe as a way to process what I was experiencing, I turned a lot of the things that I was seeing into fictionalized bits of stories, and then eventually wove it together into a full narrative."
For Buehler, books were also a guide for how to move forward and build the life that she wanted. She said she was reading a lot "in the hopes that they would tell me what I was supposed to do," and got the idea for a character who identified too much with a certain book. But eventually, she realized that while books can be a jumping-off point for ideas, an author or narrator is not necessarily endorsing the ideas portrayed in the text.
"That's sort of what Astrid is grappling with," Buehler said. "She doesn't realize that the book that she loves so much is not actually a guide for how to live your life, but is instead just a story that has more nuance, and that the main character is not necessarily doing things that are meant for readers to copy."
For Buehler, the book explores several topics: how obsessions can impact real life, the world of academia, what to do when you're feeling lost in life and how fiction can both help and hurt real-life interactions. Thus far, she's said many readers have had different interpretations, too, and it's interesting to see how that can follow the themes of the book.
"Some people are like, 'Oh, this is a book about OCD,' and then other people are like, 'This is a book about trying to figure out what to do with your life,' and other people are like, 'Well, this book is just mimicking the structure of other books that I've read,' and so it's interesting to see how I think different parts of it speak to different readers," Buehler said.
