Norwood Set to Write New ‘Love’ Book

Following on the monumental success of her first book, “Women Who Love Too Much,” Santa Barbara family therapist Robin Norwood has signed with Pocket Books to produce a sequel.

The new book, titled “Letters From Women Who Love Too Much: A Look at Relationship Addiction and Recovery,” will be published in January as the first title in Pocket Books’ new hardcover line.

Norwood’s earlier book, first issued in hardcover by Jeremy P. Tarcher Inc., shot overnight onto best-seller lists across the country. With more than 2.3-million paperback copies in print after 26 printings from Pocket Books, the self-help guide to ending “the destructive cycle of addictive love relationships” has remained on the New York Times best-seller list for 68 weeks. It has been No. 1 for 43 of those weeks.

Publishers Weekly named “Women Who Love Too Much” as the top-selling paperback of 1986 at the two largest bookselling chains, B. Dalton Bookseller and Waldenbooks. The book soon achieved cult-like status, spawning “Women Who Love Too Much” support groups all around America.

It also generated an enormous outpouring of letters from readers who identified with her description of addictive love. At first, self-described recovering relationship addict Norwood said she answered the letters individually.

But she swiftly realized that “the people sending those letters needed much more than a letter from me,” she said. “They needed each other. These women and men who were sharing so much of themselves with me needed to hear each other’s stories, to discover together how the disease of relationship addiction has operated in their lives.”

Pocket Books said it plans a 200,000 first-run hardcover printing of Norwood’s new book and will print the paperback edition about a year later.