This month, Harper Collins/It Books released the anthology "Reality Matters: 18 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching." Included is author Neal Pollack, whose love for crazy girl Billie Jeanne on "Married by America" spawns musings on the archetype as a whole. An excerpt from "Billie Jeanne Is Not My Lover" below.

Billie Jeanne, in her rawness and realness, was the best televised representation yet seen of an archetype that's haunted the margins, and sometimes the center, of my life since I hit puberty: The Crazy Girl. This type of person -- starved for attention, pale, lovely, brilliant but unaccomplished, and either consciously or unconsciously manipulative -- sparks my deepest wellspring of desire.

When you're with a Crazy Girl, at any moment your life could be a carnival of sexual, intellectual, and spiritual gratification, or it could be a dirge of drunken late-night phone calls, hastily-sent emails full of emotional recriminations, long, meaningful soppy glances, and subtle betrayals ending in alienation and unhappiness. That's what most of my relationships were like before I met my wife.

Billie Jeanne made me nostalgic for pointless complications. There's a difference, I should note, between the Crazy Girl and The Psychotic Girl. I'm not talking about Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, Rebecca De Mornay in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, or whichever Single White Female was totally barkers. Those characters, while compelling, don't appeal sexually or emotionally in the long-term, and were obviously created by guys with problems. The Crazy Girl's torments are subtler, her revenge is quieter, her invasion of your soul more insidious.

Evidence of this type still abounds in our culture. John Edwards saw his public life end at the hands of a grown-up Crazy Girl, as she compared him favorably with The Mahatma and gave him an unwanted love child. In the second season of 30 Rock, Alec Baldwin fell in with Crazy Girl guest-star Jennifer Aniston, who gave him the best sex of his life accompanied by almost unimaginable emotional torment.

These women have power, but it's a kind of Soviet-era nuclear power, with the continued threatening of a core meltdown. We tend to encounter them most often in our twenties, though they appear at other times in our life cycle as well.

One Crazy Girl in particular, possibly the Craziest Girl, made me view Billie Jeanne with even deeper passion and sympathy. I met her when I was in my early twenties, and we were both bottom-feeders in the highly lucrative world of Chicago improv comedy. She had almost translucent skin, an ability with the folk guitar, and an Ivy League-wit, making her an avis rara in a subculture where the majority of the women were wacky big-boobed blondes from Schaumburg.

Most of the guys wanted to dink her, but I, as a professional writer and a putative intellect, got into the inner circle. That afforded me the privilege of spending the night at her house from time to time. We stayed up late -- talking, soothing, and petting each other's hair. But she didn't allow me to go any further, because, she said, she didn't think we had much chemistry. I'd fall asleep next to her, our arms barely touching, my crotch ready to explode from the tension.

At around 3 AM, she'd take a deep, sighing breath, roll over onto an elbow, and start to gently brush my lips. "This doesn't mean anything," she'd say. "Of course not," I'd gasp. But it meant everything, and we'd often make out half asleep until dawn. I'd feel so complete.

Mid-morning, I'd wake up to a knock at the door. It would be one of her many other boyfriends, come to take her to brunch, or to a pick-up co-ed basketball game. He and I would sit in her living room while she made us coffee and eye each other warily, like caged panthers, grunting a little, barely speaking, but knowing that we shared a little pit of total longing, deep in our souls, for our mutual friend.

We'd play that way for months, and then she'd stop returning my calls, and then she'd start again, telling me how much she needed me, that I was the only guy smart enough to converse with her about the topics she considered important, aware of the fact that if she name-dropped a guy she'd met who'd written for The New Yorker, I'd both know who the guy was and be competitive enough with him to feel jealous. She'd get the satisfaction of having a good conversation and making me feel miserable at the same time.

One night, I went to see her play a gig at some place in Chicago where people played gigs back then; there were a lot of women who'd hung out at the same clubs with Liz Phair and were trying to replicate her success. Because I hated myself, I took a date along. Inevitably, The Crazy Girl saw me from the stage with my date and uncorked some half-thought-out insult toward me. I stood up, shouted, "F--K YOU!" and stormed out of the theater. My date didn't appreciate this.

That, I determined, was the last time I'd ever see The Crazy Girl. I didn't need the hate and the manipulation. Crazy Girls made me tired. They didn't mix well with Melodramatic Guys. Soon enough, I met my decidedly not-crazy future wife, and managed to make good on my Crazy Girl abstention vow.

A while after that, I got a call from another of The Craziest Girl's pawns. She'd gone legitimately crazy, he said, and was locked up in a low-security home for Crazy Girls. Right now, he told me, she really needed people from her past to call her and make her feel better. So I did. We talked for a while, mostly about the poetry she was reading.

Finally she asked the question: "So, are you seeing anybody?" "I'm getting married next year," I said. "Oh, that's too bad," she sighed. "I really think that when I get out of here, we can have a chance together."

My life would have gone very differently if I'd agreed.