Amanda McCracken is a freelance journalist and instructor at Lighthouse, whose latest book, When Longing Becomes Your Lover, was published in February 2026 with Hachette. She has also been published with the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, National Geographic, Elle, Outside, NPR, ESPN, and Runner’s World. Her latest book is an exploration of relationships and intimacy (particularly virginity), and how her perspectives shifted over time.
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McCracken will be teaching at this year's Lit Fest on the lessons she learned from working on this book. She gave the TEDx talk "How longing keeps us from healthy relationships" and has a workshop on helping you learn how to turn your own essays into a TEDx talk. She also has a class on how to build a platform via essay writing to boost the potential of your own book getting published. McCraken herself published an essay in the Times, which became the foundation of this book. Keep the conversation on how to do something similar on the publishing track at the Clips and Careers Lunchtime Business Panel, where one editor will be taking pitches!
Book Project participant Jenny Catlin got to meet McCracken at one of Lighthouse's Weekend Fests. Hear her thoughts on meeting the author and her review of her latest book.
Jenny's Book Review
Amanda McCracken and I met in the bar line at a VIP meet-and-greet for Melissa Febos after Lighthouse’s Love Fest, which is exactly the kind of sentence that should make me feel cool and instead mostly made me feel like I was standing in a room full of people more beautiful, confident, and important than I am. This is not where I do my best work socially. Amanda, being disarming in a way that made me like her almost immediately, asked how I talk to writers and whether I get nervous, and we ended up talking about exactly that: the mechanics of feeling inadequate.
I’d heard her on a panel a few months before and made a note to buy her book when it came out. Longing is, unfortunately, one of my native languages, so When Longing Becomes Your Lover already had me by the throat. On paper, it’s a book about limerence, obsessive romantic longing, idealization, the mind’s habit of fastening itself to the unavailable. But it’s also about purity culture, perfectionism, fantasy, delayed intimacy, and the stories women inherit about what love is supposed to feel like. What makes the book land is that McCracken doesn’t flatten any of it into a clean lesson. She lets longing stay complicated.
That mattered to me because I have not lived her version of womanhood. I am not the purity-culture virgin. I am not the woman who waited. My own history sits at a very different end of the spectrum. And yet the book reveals, almost immediately, how familiar the interior machinery can feel. Different costumes, different scripts, same old female damage. The same self-surveillance. The same hunger to be chosen. The same willingness to mistake deprivation for meaning. It didn’t matter if she was at Bible camp and I was on tour with the band.
One of the smartest things McCracken does is refuse the flattened moral arc that so often structures memoirs about faith, sex, and recovery. She told me she didn’t want to write the familiar church-screwed-me-up memoir, even while acknowledging the real harms and contradictions of purity culture. You can feel that refusal in the book. She doesn’t sand down the friction between the secular and the religious, the bodily and the spiritual, the funny and the devastating, just to make herself more legible.
The chapter that best shows this might be “Mr. Maybe,” where she takes something painfully ordinary, looking up an ex on social media, digging up what was supposed to be dead, and follows it all the way into the strange depth of grief. The accepted friend request becomes messages, then a visit, then a goodbye so brutal it leaves her sobbing in his arms and physically ill afterward. If you have ever been built in that particular unfortunate way, you know exactly how real that is. But what makes the chapter more than a story about one man is the way she pans in and out, linking that heartbreak to older loss, including her grandfather’s death. She makes something deeply specific to her life feel embarrassingly universal.
And because she is wise enough not to drown in solemnity, she also lets herself be funny. After invoking the line from Peter Pan about unreturned love having its rainbow, McCracken undercuts it by writing that by her mid-thirties, she’d become “a damn leprechaun chasing rainbows.” That tonal balance is hard to pull off. She does.
When Longing Becomes Your Lover is smart, vulnerable, and startlingly kind. It understands longing not as some embarrassing glitch in broken women, but as a structure many of us were taught to live inside. McCracken doesn’t offer a cure. She offers language, pattern, and witness. Sometimes that’s the more honest gift.
Meet the Author
Jenny Catlin has seen much success as a Pushcart Prize winner, a notable mention for Best American Essays, and as a writer for The Athletic, The Gettysburg Review, Willow Springs, and Horror-Sleaze-Trash, among other publications. As an educator, she has taught incarcerated people, college freshmen, and adults with intellectual disabilities. Jenny has ghostwritten thousands of pages of bureaucratic policy documents.
