There’s a distinct thrill in reading a novel that makes you feel seen, mocked, and entirely transfixed. Lizzie Buehler’s The Obsessed does exactly that, delivering a sharp-witted and offbeat tale of obsession that I devoured in less than twenty-four hours. Adam of Debutiful calls the novel “sad, weird, and horny,” and I imagine most readers will relate to Astrid, the novel’s endearingly neurotic heroine, as she projects her literary and romantic obsessions onto real people.
I had a blast chatting with Buehler about the glorious voyeurism of autofiction, giving yourself permission to drop out of a PhD program, navigating the relentless pressure to produce, and the refreshing collaborative spirit of the international translation community.
CAITLIN BARASCH: Hi Lizzie! I’m so excited to chat about your debut novel The Obsessed. Before we jump in, I’d love to get a sense of your journey to reach this moment. You’re an award-winning literary translator of Korean novels, a medical school student, and now a novelist debuting your own work in English—I’m so curious to hear about your journey through these disciplines.
LIZZIE BUEHLER: I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I’m two years into medical school [at Temple University.] I just started my third year observing this completely foreign world, which I definitely want to write about in the future.
To answer your question, my path to translation started because I loved foreign languages as a kid. I got a scholarship to spend a year as an exchange student at a Korean high school, which is where I learned the language. I kept studying it in college and randomly took a literary translation class. I was fortunate because few undergrad programs offer that. At first, I just thought it was a good way to maintain my Korean, but it turned out to be incredibly fun—it’s creative but deeply analytical at the same time, which satisfied the grammar nerd in me.
Later, I applied to the University of Iowa’s translation MFA on a whim because an undergrad classmate told me I could get a free master’s degree in a really cool community. It was an amazing intellectual experience. One of my classmates was a Norwegian translator with long-lasting relationships with many Norwegian writers, and there were also people translating from Japanese and Sinhalese, one of the languages of Sri Lanka. And international writers come to Iowa every year for the fall semester, and you can take a class where you directly translate their work. I translated parts of a play by Kim Jaehoon. So I just loved how the environment was entirely collaborative and involved thinking about non-English languages, which I felt was rare. So much of the contemporary English-language literary world is insular, especially in the U.S., which is a shame. I guess it’s just not normalized to read books in translation.
CB: Maybe it’s also because smaller presses tend to publish translations because they’re willing to take risks, but then they don’t get wide distribution. It becomes an issue of access and ignorance rather than a shameful lack of interest—people just don’t realize there’s a whole world out there! I personally find it overwhelming when I realize I’ll never be able to read everything.
LB: Exactly. That’s why I wanted to make translation my vocation. But obviously, it does not offer financial stability. I realized there are basically three ways to support yourself as a translator: 1) Have a full-time job and translate on the side (which is my current plan—hopefully working part-time as a doctor eventually) 2) Have a spouse or family who supports you financially or 3) Go into academia, which is what a lot of people do. I initially chose academia and started a PhD, thinking I could translate on the side. But I quickly realized a PhD was a full-time job that drained my intellectual energy. I don’t love writing academic papers, so I knew pretty early on it wasn’t where I wanted to be. Readers can probably tell from THE OBSESSED that a lot of my angst and uncertainty about being a PhD student was channeled into the story. It wasn’t me, but the character shared a lot of my anxieties, so it was highly cathartic. I spent the first year of my PhD wondering what I was doing with my life—and it was during COVID, so everything was on Zoom.
CB: A Zoom PhD does sound like a horrifying dystopian satire. But it seems like you ultimately created your own version of a PhD by drawing your intellectual stimulation from translation and collaboration with Korean writers. Sometimes we think we need the structure of an institution or a degree, only to realize we were already doing the work for ourselves.
LB: Giving myself permission to drop out of my PhD felt like acknowledging that I don’t need institutional validation to learn or experience the world. But that’s hard when you’ve been in structured academic environments your whole life, like I was. You start to think it’s the only right way, and that independent work isn’t valid. It grated on me a lot. I’ve probably become less angsty as I’ve gotten older, but at the time, the normalized elitism in academic spaces really frustrated me—the way people assume the validity of your curiosity or knowledge based entirely on institutional hierarchy. A comparative literature PhD is probably the peak of that because it’s so esoteric. When people asked what I studied, I usually just said “literature.” Actually, someone once asked me if comp-lit meant “computer literature.” That was the funniest thing ever.
CB: Wow. Maybe people will be teaching AI literature by 2040. It’s going to be terrifying. Anyway, what ultimately led you to medical school, and what surprised you about the similarities between writing, translation, and medicine?
LB: While writing the first draft of THE OBSESSED during my PhD, I did a lot of journaling and reflecting on what was missing in my life. I kept thinking: what is important to me? I wanted a job that interacted with society directly, outside the cloistered nature of academia. By chance, I met a psychiatrist in a coffee shop while doing my Chinese homework. He’d majored in Chinese in undergrad and used it to work with patients in Boston’s Chinatown. When he told me about that, my brain kind of exploded—like, whoa, that’s a job you can do? I realized that was my dream: to talk to people, use different languages, and listen to the stories of their lives. But my desire to do that felt insane, because I was a 25-year-old comp-lit grad student, and we often think we can’t change paths at that point. I had to go against expectations, which was hard for me, but I took the prerequisites, applied, and got in.
It’s been fascinating to transition from academia to medicine. Even though they are completely different structures, both rely on highly specialized knowledge; in medicine, everyone understands residency training and hospital bureaucracy the same way academics understand tenure. The transition has had its challenges—I’m not naturally great at multiple-choice science tests, and I naively thought being older would make it easier. In reality, having more life perspective made it harder because I wasn’t willing to self-flagellate just to get top scores.
Regarding narrative and medicine, people throw around the phrase “narrative medicine” a lot. I’ve noticed a very intense earnestness in writing by doctors, but there is so much potential to point out the absurdity of the system too—like the fact that it’s normal for residents to work 80 hours a week for years.
CB: It’s so interesting hearing you say that, because I’m currently working on a book related to psychiatry—
LB: Wait, that’s hilarious that we have so many overlapping—
CB: I know! We could honestly talk off-the-record for hours. But to your point, good psychiatrists allow patients to tell the story of their illness holistically without pathologizing them. We all have a story of our bodies. In grad school, we read a great poem called “Medical History” by Nicole Sealey, and our professor had us write our own. It was a vulnerable, fascinating prompt that could be useful for medical students and patients to articulate their history beyond a rote medical chart. There is an obvious overlap between medicine and writing because life is a story, and that story inevitably includes illness.
Now let’s talk about THE OBSESSED more directly. You’ve described the book as a “full immersion into the pleasures and dangers of obsession.” To quote a conversation from your novel:
“At some point when we were in Iowa, Charlie had banned me from mentioning Sofiya’s name. ‘I know you’re not obsessed with her for normal reasons, like jealousy or whatever,’ he said, ‘but you have to stop thinking about her. It’s weird.’ It had to be something else her existence implied.”
Culturally, we tend to focus on the dangers of fixation—spiraling and boundary-pushing. I’d love to hear you talk about the genuine pleasures of obsession, both for your protagonist, Astrid, and in real life.
LB: There is a Japanese phrase, Mikka-bouzu (三日坊主), which translates to the “three-day monk.” It refers to someone who gets really obsessed with a new interest and then drops it after a few days. I learned the phrase in college and identified with it immediately. As a child I’d become completely consumed by certain hobbies or foreign languages for a week or a month before my interest waned. I remember at one point I bought a Finnish textbook from a used bookstore and thought: I’m going to learn Finnish. And that lasted one week. I felt ashamed because my parents and my brother would be like: oh, little Lizzie never follows through. But looking back, I think I was just curious about everything. Jumping from hobby to hobby is a way to experience the fullness of life. So, maybe the positive side of obsession is that you get to experience something with incredible intensity. Because the nature of obsession can be so intense, it doesn’t typically last very long, but it is overwhelmingly enjoyable while it lasts—even if it’s like eating addictive candy and feeling a bit sick afterward.
CB: Right, and it’s better to be obsessed than apathetic! It’s interesting to think of obsession as fleeting, but perhaps it can eventually be incorporated into your life in a healthy, palatable way. Pivoting a bit—one of my favorite scenes is when Astrid attends Sofiya’s reading, finds it disappointing, and ruminates on the questions she wishes she could have asked, like: “Do you feel anxiety about writing, and if so, how do you deal with it? Do you feel writerly jealousy, and if so, how do you deal with it?” I thought this was hilarious and so relatable. Have you contemplated these same questions on your own journey as a debut novelist?
LB: I wrote that because I think about those things constantly. I think all writers do. I experience anxiety intermittently—it can be intense, but I’ve gotten more comfortable with it as I’ve gotten older. I’ve also learned to be okay with simply not being in a writing phase. I’ve always found some advice—like writing a strict word count every day—to be incredibly anxiety-inducing.
CB: Right! Or the pressure that you must write your second novel before the first one even comes out, or else you’ll lose the ability to write entirely.
LB: Exactly. I have a difficult relationship with reduction, which I put into the novel when Astrid discusses the SCUM Manifesto [by Valerie Solanas]. One of my obsessions has always been that I’m sort of horrified by how much stuff there is in the world—when I’m spiraling about that, I think: people are writing too many books! I gave Astrid that thought too, and developed it in this sort of humorous way, but I do think we should step back and ask: am I writing just to write, or am I writing because I actually have something I want to say? I don’t want to write another book until I feel a story needs to be expressed. Right now, I’m just journaling and observing. Journaling helps me process the world deeply, and I hope eventually it will all come together into whatever I want to say next.
CB: It’ll probably happen when you finish medical school, look back through your notes, and realize how much happened during those years. In the novel, Astrid asks Sofiya a version of that question: What advice do you have for young writers trying to balance the desire to be reflective with relentless external pressure to produce? Journaling is the perfect counter to that pressure because even when you aren’t actively working on a project, you’re still perceiving the world through your very specific writerly lens. There are input periods and output periods.
LB: Yes. To circle back to the jealousy question, I think it connects to obsession. I gave Astrid a tendency to idealize people and create narratives about them without actually knowing them. Writerly jealousy is often just being envious of the narrative you yourself have constructed about someone else’s life.
CB: Exactly. There are obvious similarities between you and Astrid that you don’t try to hide. A potentially controversial interview question you might face is: What’s real, what’s not, and is this autobiographical? I got that a lot with my work and hated it because it undermined the actual craft of character building. Astrid actually speaks about autofiction in the book itself, so are you bracing for this line of inquiry, or will you welcome it?
LB: I don’t really have a set plan for it. I read a lot of autofiction and autobiographical fiction while writing this book. I genuinely love autofiction because it’s essentially published gossip. It was popular to malign it for a while—between 2015 and the early 2020s, everyone seemed so up in arms about it—but many classical Russian writers that people love also wrote heavily from their own lives too. This is just what writers have always done.
CB: Exactly. I think it’s also because we’re being perceived —people can internet-stalk us and assume that because a writer shares some similarities with their character, they are their character.
LB: That’s a good point. And it also connects to this idea that writers have to build a brand—something I struggle with because I want acknowledgement for my work, but I also don’t want to curate an image, even though I often find myself seduced by or envious of other writers’ ‘brands.’ And on the topic of autofiction versus autobiographical fiction, for THE OBSESSED I drew inspiration from my life, but I constructed a fictional story—unlike Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, for example, which is a literal account of what happened. People tend to mix those genres up. When I was writing, I felt I was expressing the absolute truth of what it felt like to be in the world at that time. But looking back now that I’m a bit older, Astrid doesn’t feel like me anymore. She is stuck in that particular story, which has a limit, while I’ve grown and changed.
CB: That’s so interesting and true. Years pass between writing the first page of our book and then seeing it out in the world—we become different people. Speaking of that timeline, did anything major change between your first and final draft? What has been the most enjoyable part of the publishing process so far?
LB: The first scene changed so much. It wasn’t really working and I was stubbornly clinging to it, but no one really liked it. And my mom at one point suggested some crazy additions—she was like, you should have a duel, and I was like, that has nothing to do with the book!
[Laughter.]
LB: I ended up writing a completely new first scene, which was such a big change. It was hard because I was so attached to the existing draft. I really had to trust my agent and editor, who were so thoughtful and gave such amazing feedback, but it’s also scary to trust external opinions. The book sold in 2023, and because I was in medical school, I edited at a slower pace over two years. I didn’t actually write the new opening scene until a year into that process. It surprised me how many times you think you are completely finished with edits only to hear, “Just one more round!” It was stressful at that moment, but I feel really fortunate to have had so many people thinking deeply about the book. My relationship with editing is a mix of dread and satisfaction. I get scared when I see all the comments, but then when I actually sit down and come up with something that sounds good, I’m proud of it—and those moments remind me how much I like writing. Editing feels analytical in the exact same way that translating a sentence does. It’s the same satisfaction. To write a well-structured book, you need to have a combination of the analytical side and the creative side.
CB: I absolutely agree. Now I’m curious to hear about some of your reading recommendations! First, what’s the last book you read and loved?
LB: Stoner by John Williams.
CB: Since your protagonist Astrid uses a novel as a literal manual for her life and her relationships, I wonder if there are any specific novels that resonated with you at a specific moment in your life? Sometimes the right book at the right time can be life-changing!
LB: Before and while writing The Obsessed, I got really into this idea that I was going to find a novel or book that would answer the question of how to live my life, how to deal with the uncertainty of all the choices you have to make and changes that you have to experience in your twenties (and, honestly, beyond). I was really into books where the narrator was trying to figure something out, who was kind of disturbed by the decisions everyone around them was making but didn’t know what else to do. There’s of course The Idiot by Elif Batuman, and then other books in this vein would be How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti, The Bell Jar, and to some degree I Love Dick. I was interested in auto(biographical) fiction and what makes a story fictional or not. I remember being really struck by Couplets by Maggie Millner.
I was also reading a bunch of nonfiction texts about gender and female sexuality that completely blew my mind because they made me realize how brainwashed I’d been in my ways of thinking about relationships my entire life until then, even though I hadn’t realized I was being brainwashed. Some of the most important books included The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone (I forced my roommates to have a book club with me where we discussed the book), Sexual Fluidity by Lisa Diamond, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality by Jane Ward, and (even though it’s kind of self-help) Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator by Amy Gahran.
And of course there’s all the translation theory and academic texts relating to Korean literature that I read during my master’s degree. For translation, that’s Lawrence Venuti, Derrida, Schleiermacher, This Little Art by Kate Briggs, the books by Yun Ko-eun and others that I was translating from Korean. And a lot of academic texts about Korean history, the history of communist internationalism, and the Korean diaspora.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lizzie Buehler is the translator of The Disaster Tourist (winner of the CWA Dagger for crime fiction in translation), Art on Fire, and Table for One by Yun Ko-eun, and Korean Teachers by Seo Su-jin. She holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa and has studied comparative literature at Harvard and Princeton. The Obsessed is her debut novel.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Caitlin Barasch is the author of A Novel Obsession (Dutton/Penguin Random House), which was a Good Morning America Buzz Pick and named a “Best Book of 2022” by BuzzFeed. Her novel has also been featured in Vogue, New York Post, and Harper’s Bazaar. A native New Yorker, Caitlin earned her MFA from New York University. She teaches creative writing at The Writers Circle and is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Colorado College.