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HYSTERIA

Jessica Gross

A sexy, psychological debut novel featuring Freud as a Brooklyn bartender.

In Hysteria, we meet a young woman an hour into yet another alcohol-fueled, masochistic, sexual bender at her local bar. There is a new bartender working this time, one she hasn't seen before, and who can properly make a drink. He looks familiar, and as she is consumed by shame from her behavior the previous week - hooking up with her parents' colleague and her roommate's brother - she also becomes convinced that her Brooklyn bartender is actually Sigmund Freud. They embark on a relationship, and she is forced to confront her past through the prism of their complex, revealing, and sometimes shocking meetings. With the help of Freud - or whoever he is - she begins to untangle her Oedipal leanings, her upbringing, and her desires. Jessica Gross's debut is unflinchingly perceptive and honest, darkly funny, and unafraid of mining the deepest fears of contemporary lives. Jessica Gross's writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and The Paris Review Daily, among other places. She holds an MFA in fiction from The New School, a Master's degree in cultural reporting and criticism from New York University and a Bachelor's in anthropology from Princeton University. She has received fellowships in fiction from the Yiddish Book Center and the 14th Street Y, where she also served as editor of the LABA Journal. She currently teaches writing at Eugene Lang College at The New School. Hysteria is her first novel.

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Book Published 2020-08-18 by Unnamed Press

Comments

HYSTERIA has been optioned for TV by UCP (Universal Content Productions)/ Littleton Road (Patrick Macmanus's production company). Screenwriter Stephanie Kornick (Transparent, Mistresses, United States of Tara) is attached to the project and has 3 seasons planned out.

Jessica Gross's riveting tale of sexual adventure and misadventure is at once a scrupulous analysis of the way desire and shame fuel each other in the human psyche, and a dark, fantastical comedy of breakdown and self-discovery in contemporary New York. I loved its bracing candor, its bold resurrection of Freud for the twenty-first century, its bright sketches of city sidewalks and bars, above all its tender intelligence and good humor. Hysteria seems to me the work of a true original

If Ottessa Moshfegh and Phoebe Waller-Bridge painted the town red together, this could be the fictive product of their evening out. Nervy, candid, wet with ink-black humor, HYSTERIA champions female sexual appetites while also exploring the emotional hunger that leads to self sabotage.

Jessica Gross has not written a character I could relate to; but she has written a character I could get inside, a tiny body within the narrator's larger one, gasping for air, feeling as claustrophobic and anxious and obsessive as the narrator is...and somehow, still totally enjoying myself.

It is every bit a page-turner as it is a descent into sexual madness. Read more...

Who better to confront parental wrongs and sexual acting out then the master himself? In Hysteria, Gross has created what many of us dream of--a direct relationship with the enigmatic Freud. In a story that is both delightfully deluded and emotionally raw, Hysteria is true to its name, you want to look away but you can't--this book grips you!

The author published a piece in the New York Times Sunday Magazine that we can all relate to in this Zoom era: "What Phone Calls Have Given Me that Video Chat Can't." Read more...

In present-day Brooklyn at the back of a dark dive bar, a distraught young woman becomes convinced her new bartender is actually Sigmund Freud. Jessica Gross's debut novel features exacting and illustrative prose, weaving a redemptive tale of pain, trauma and healing into a lyrical fever dream. At times humorous but always deeply introspective, it's a powerfully feminine work perfect for fans of Sally Rooney, Carmen Maria Machado or Jess Broder. This is the book you'll debate at the water cooler for the rest of the year.

At first, Hysteria feels like another entry in the canon of recent novels about self-destructive, masochistic young women - but soon things start to shift, as our extremely lustful, extremely self-hating heroine meets a man at a bar and... decides he is Sigmund Freud. Which, twist. After that, the novel only gets weirder, and only goes deeper, the centerpiece a half-real, half-fantasy recollection of the narrator's first orgasm, and in the end, the whole thing feels like an R-rated, modern version of Clarice Lispector's insane, intense The Passion According to G. H. If you're into that kind of thing. Read more...

...a serpentine exploration into the dark behaviors and even darker thoughts... Lest you think it's just all pitch-black sexual drama, let me also reassure you that it's very funny - the bartender with whom the narrator works out some of her issues with is dubbed Freud, and, really, what's funnier than that?

Hysteria tells the truth about the counterintuitive logic of desire and daughterhood as its perfectly flawed heroine tries to obliterate herself one Daddy at a time. So intimate I felt like I was eavesdropping, a debut that is from page one as compelling and breathless as the sex bender it details. A lusty feat. Hysteria is a thrilling, sexy tear.