First Love: Guiding Teens through Relationships and Heartbreak
Release date: February 4, 2025 (Rowman & Littlefield)
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Today’s young people are beginning their love lives in a time of rapidly changing ideas and ideals about identity, commitment, sexuality, and consent. For parents, the new realities of teenage relationships can be both mystifying and daunting.
In First Love: Guiding Teens through Relationships and Heartbreak, Lisa A. Phillips chronicles the challenges today’s adolescents face as they navigate experiences of crushes, dating, and breakups—and the challenges adults face as they strive to provide guidance and support. Phillips sheds light on how the relationships teens have today are different from their parents’ generation, including their reliance on technology and social media, the rise of young people identifying as LGBTQ+, high rates of depression and anxiety, and consent consciousness. She provides concrete strategies and insights from experts and teens themselves on ways parents and other adults can help young people cope with the timeless issues of love and heartbreak.
“I hope they make this required reading not only for every teenage girls in America but for everyboy, man and woman, whether partnered or not, because we could all use a dose of its well-researched wisdom.”
Unrequited: The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Romantic Obsession
HarperCollins, 2015
The summer Lisa A. Phillips turned thirty, she fell in love with someone who didn’t return her feelings. She soon became obsessed. She followed him around, called him compulsively, and talked about him endlessly. One desperate morning, after she snuck into his apartment building, he picked up a baseball bat to protect himself and began to dial 911. Her unrequited love had changed her from a sane, conscientious college teacher and radio reporter into someone she barely recognized―someone who was taking her yearning much too far.
In Unrequited, Phillips explores the tremendous force of obsessive love in women’s lives. She argues that it needs to be understood, respected, and channeled for personal growth―yet it also has the potential to go terribly awry. Interweaving her own story with frank interviews and in-depth research in science, psychology, cultural history, and literature, Phillips describes how romantic obsession takes root, grows, and strongly influences our thoughts and behaviors.
Going beyond images of creepy, fatally attracted psychos, male fantasies of unbridled female desire, and the platitudes of self-help books, Phillips reveals a powerful, troubling, and surprisingly common phenomenon. As she illuminates this mysterious psychological experience, placing it in a rich and nuanced context, she offers compelling insights to help any woman who has experienced unrequited obsessive love and been mystified and troubled by its grip.
“What happens when we can’t stop wanting someone who won’t love us back? In Unrequited, Lisa Phillips tackles with empathy and wisdom the pain of desire that is left unreciprocated.”
“Unfortunately, there is no cure for the pain of rejection, although researchers are working on it.Until then, Phillips suggests we ‘honor passion by confining and using it instead of letting it diminish us.”
Public Radio: Behind the Voices
Perseus, 2006
An avid fan of public radio, Lisa A. Phillips was driven to know more about the people who deliver the news, the conversation, and the diverse programs that she and millions of others rely on every day. The result is Public Radio: Behind the Voices, a collection of personal stories from more than forty of the most listened-to voices in public radio, including Noah Adams, Susan Stamberg, Scott Simon, Diane Rehm, and Terry Gross.