Imagine this: a woman meets a man in the bar. The man is the bartender. The bartender is Freud? Hilarity ensues. Hysteria follows an unnamed narrator railing from yet-another night of drunk masochistic sexual proclivities. When she drunkenly sleeps with an acquaintance of her therapist parents as well as her roommates’ brother, she begins to unravel quickly. Looking for anything and anyone to soothe her guilt, she copes through sexual alcohol-fueled violence. That is, until she bumps into a Brooklyn bartender, who she is convinced is Sigmund Freud. Hysteria is a humorous look into the life of a young woman on the brink of complex realizations, with past damages on her sexual psyche upending her current life.
I sat down with author Jessica Gross to talk about along with thoughts on writing about sex, feminist literature, her influences, and, of course, Freud.
—Natalia Berry, 2020-2021 Poetry Editor
This interview was recorded, transcribed, and edited for clarity.
12TH STREET: I read an essay you wrote for LitPub centering your defensive psychoanalysis while writing the Freudian fiction. As someone myself who has spent, like, a decade on CTB (cognitive behavioral therapy—a very capitalist, results-driven type of therapy) I was struck by the idea that psychoanalysis was a plane “where questions and interpretations were more important than answers, where associations were more meaningful than facts, where a life was as ripe for analysis as a text.” How did this philosophy influence writing Hysteria?
JESSICA GROSS: I mean, I think it’s influenced everything that I do, I would say. The entire way that I live my life and interpret everything that goes on around me. So, it would be hard to separate any of my writing. I think from this psychoanalytic lens through which I’ve been trained to see, but Hysteria is very explicitly psychoanalytical because this narrator believes she is interacting with Freud himself. The Freud of the book is a combination of things that I knew about the real Freud, but also fantasy and projection on the narrator’s part. The other thing I would say is that I’m very into parent-child relationships. It isn’t really subtle, but it can seem so subtle the way parents affect their children. That was something I was interested in exploring in the book.
STREET: Right, parent-child relationships are such a large tenant of Freud’s analysis, which seems to be a huge part of the novel. We can touch on several things here, but let’s start with the protagonist. The protagonist’s name in Hysteria is never revealed, which felt like an intentional call-back to the tenets of psychoanalysis. Lately, there have been several successful pieces of media, like Fleabag for instance, that follow this nameless-narrator format. What do you think is the utility and impact of the anonymous yet vulnerable narrator?
GROSS: I mean it’s always a controversial choice to do something like that. I feel like it could be seen as irritating or pretentious, but it was really important to me because. . . I don’t know what it is like for other people, but I don’t think of myself as Jessica. I mean obviously that is my name, but it is not how I narrate my own experience of the world. I narrate my experience as “me” or “I”—that is the lens. Not the third-person reference. Because this book was so deeply embedded in her consciousnesses, and she has a more self-centered myopic consciousness than many other people, I felt like it could be very helpful not to name her.
STREET: That is really interesting because like, what is the idea of names, anyway? It could be cultural, but that identity is given to you by your parents. You talk about identity, as in the “self,” but what is in a name really?
GROSS: The narrator’s parents are also not named. On a personal note, pretty long into my own analysis, I asked my analyst if she knew my brother’s name, and she said no. At first that irritated me, I kept thinking how could this person not know my brother’s name? But then it made sense to me because I name people via their relationship to me. My mother, my father, my brother. Rather than thinking of them as separate people with their own identities. That is how I see the narration of my life, and that thought is what I wanted to give the narrator in Hysteria.
STREET: The first line of Hysteria is one for the ages. I’ve spoken with so many friends about it. “I could cum so many times looking at my radiator. I wondered if I could orgasm from that latticework alone.” Sex in Hysteria is a such a source of liberation, alienation, and even soothing. Soothing is used several times along with the illusions to Oedipal desire and domination. How do you strike the balance between quote-unquote smut and literature? Is there even a balance to be struck there?
GROSS: One thing that has occurred to me since this book has been published is that I think that it is much less challenging to write literary erotica that is not just purely pleasurable or loving. I think it would be a hard challenge to write sex that is healthy and came from a place of total pleasure that wasn’t cheesy or smutty. Here, there was so much about the damage of her psyche that I wanted to explore through sexual proclivities or fears of actual intimacy with people. I think that is easier to integrate into the literary aspirations that I had for this book. I don’t know that the distinction is important necessarily. Some sex scenes, I don’t know I would even call them more literary, but they are skillful and surprising and unusual, just like any good writing. They are not cliché nor do theyresort to euphuism. They are direct and use surprising imagery that helps me see anew. It seems to me like any other writing. Less important to me for something to be literary vs smutty, but more that I hoped to do was to write sex that was new and surprising, rather than cliché and familiar.
STREET: It’s funny that you say that as I was preparing for this interview, I saw Garth Greenwell on Twitter talking about sex as a plot device. The way you are describing your thoughts on sex, creating anew, I think it speaks to the intentionality of your characters.
GROSS: I have to say, I love Garth Greenwell’s writing. What Belongs to You is one of my favorite books. Funny that you should mention him because when I thought about writing about sex, I held up his work as an aspiration.
STREET: Well, I feel like you totally made it there. While we are on the subject on sex, we should talk about Freud. Freud is a very controversial figure who had several controversial ideas about women and female sexuality. He once famously referred to female sexuality as a Dark Continent, a phrase he co-opted from colonialism. How did Freud influence the novel? His work, but also him as a person?
GROSS: It’s a really complicated thing. There’s a great biography of Freud by a psychoanalyst and Professor named Joel Whitebook, and he mounts the argument that while yes Freud was very flawed, as we all are, his flaws were perhaps counter-imitatively necessary to shape what his work offers. He describes how Freud had a complicated relationship to his own mother, whom he idealized. No one was physicalizing him. He was psychoanalyzing himself. You can only go so far. According to this biography, one of his brothers died when he was very young, and his mother was absent a huge chunk of his early childhood. Emotionally absent, not physically. This was a less than ideal relationship for Freud, but also, he never fully analyzed this relationship, the way he would’ve if he was in an analysis today perhaps with someone else.
I think his theories suffered the way anyone’s would from the limitations he had as a person and his incapacity to look with a gimlet eye at his relationships. In the precarious, rigid way that he developed, that was responsible for the flaws you were describing, he was also able to create an enormous body of work which re-conceptualized the way we understand the human mind. His genius is undeniable, or so I hope it is. I think there have been enough theorists who have come after Freud focusing on mother-child relationships, infancy, and other things that he wasn’t deeply focused on. I think personally that it is okay to appreciate his tremendous accomplishments and what he offered, but also to understand that like in any other field, things are complicated. I read a lot of his work, far from all of it, but I have been fascinated by everything I’ve read. I’m a “take what is fascinating and leave the rest” approach person. That is a long way of saying: I have enjoyed reading him a lot, and feel very indebted to psychoanalysis which is credited to him. And that is why he appears within the novel.
STREET: There is this idea that you can separate art from artist or work from the person, which is an interesting approach. But with Freud, I think his work is embedded in who he is and his and his overall impact he had on human development and psychology, sexuality, and childhood development as we talk about it today. I was reading some oppositions like Karen Horney. In order to get to the opposition, they had to build upon his work.
GROSS: I actually went to a talk that Joel Whitebook gave and he said something about how he felt like Freud was partially responsible for Second Wave Feminism because some women activists so vehemently responded to the omissions in his work. I mean, I don’t know, maybe that’s a stretch, but I thought it was an interesting read.
STREET: That’s an interesting thought. Along those lines, how would you describe something that is feminist lit? I’ve been thinking a lot of moniker, as I consider myself to be a feminist. But what does it mean to write feminist lit in our modern era? What is feminist literature? I could see Hysteria being put in that box; however, the tenets of the novel are through Freud who many see as an opposition to feminism.
GROSS: You know, I don’t know. When I had my first meeting with my agent before I signed with her, she described Hysteria as a feminist Portnoy’s Complaint, which I really loved. But it’s not like I sat down and thought, I’m going to write a feminist book. It was more that I’m really interested in writing about the psyche of a woman because I am a woman. It gave me a lot of pleasure to invert this. I was thinking a lot of Portnoy’s Complaint when I was writing history and the pleasure of inverting the narrative so that it was a woman in the position that the male protagonist in that book was in. It is complicated because it’s not like I condone the narrator’s behavior. I don’t think it’s healthy for anybody to objectify their sexual partners. It’s not really kind to whoever you are with to be so alienated from humanity, and it’s also really bad for you. You don’t get to intimately connect with anyone.
STREET: That idea of looking for why within psychoanalysis definitely comes through. It isn’t “let’s try to fix this” or even as a mirror of how to be.
GROSS: I guess it just feels more complicated than that feminist lit label. To call Hysteria a purely feminist text would seem to me to say that I was condoning her behavior or holding it up as a paradigm. I’m not interested in shaming her, either. I’m more interested or curious about her psyche, parts that feel familiar to me, as myself.
STREET: I have to tell you several moments while reading Hysteria, I laughed out loud. There are so many New York observations that were great. The biggest being, Sigmund Freud really does look like so many Brooklyn bartenders I know.
GROSS: (laughs) I know, it’s so good isn’t it?
STREET: (laughs) And several romantic partners I’ve had, and friends I’ve had. It was such a visceral realization really. What is The Bartender’s, who may or may not be Freud, significance in the novel?
GROSS: What’s actually popping into my head is the origin story of the idea. It wasn’t that I was like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if she thought a bartender was Freud?” You can make the analogy that bartenders function as therapist figures for people who tell them their problems. Maybe this is a comment on my own intelligence or something, but that’s not actually the first way it came about. I knew that I wanted this narrator to anachronistically encounter a man who she believes is Freud. Actually, at first it was literally Freud. He just randomly appeared in modern times. I initially set the novel in Vienna, and I didn’t know where they were going to meet. Over time, I changed it to Brooklyn because it seemed more fun. Also, there was a professor I had at grad school in the New School MFA Program, Helen Schulman, who I took my very first workshop with who said something like, “How does she meet him? Is he just like delivering Chinese food or what?” And I thought, wow that’s such a great idea. But then it felt so intransitive to the narrator’s lifestyle that she would meet him at a bar. She’s always at bars. I had already written a few bar scenes. I feel like the obvious symbolism came along with that, but it wasn’t the reason. It sort of just happened more fortuitously like the strange creative process happens sometimes.
STREET: Right. I’m so interested in the craft of plotting. When we were talking about identity earlier, occupation is often a placeholder for identity, and the way you face a bartender is an interesting utility for mirroring your own identity. There’re so many characters within the novel like JoJo and Sam who sort of felt like these millennial mirrors and New York archetypes we’ve been missing. Because we are still pandemic, Hysteria sometimes felt like New York in a past-life. Kissing a stranger seems so strange now. I wanted to know what is your relationship to the city and has it changed since you wrote Hysteria?
GROSS: Yeah, well it changed a lot. I did not grow up in Manhattan like the narrator. I grew up on Long Island, in the suburbs. My parents didn’t work in the city. It was a place we went, like, once a year-ish. We would go to Times Square, stay at a hotel, and see a play. Something like that. The city was 45 minutes away, but was more an intimidating fantasy object in my mind. But anyway, I moved there after college to Gowanus where my narrator happens to live. I moved there in 2007 and really grew up there. I lived there for thirteen years until the pandemic happened, through the writing of this book. I lived in many apartments, probably six apartments. In the beginning it was “when I was going to move out here,” but then I became really attached to the city. It became a part of my personality. I made so many friends over several years. It was a long time. In December, right before the pandemic, I entered a long-distance relationship. So, I moved temporarily, now permanently to West Texas, which is where I’m talking to you from.
STREET: Oh no!
GROSS: I know. I’ll be there for the summer, which I’m so excited for, and I really miss it. But in a way the pre-pandemic New York of the novel has sort of been conserved in my memory because I haven’t had to watch it go through this intense change, even when I obviously knew what was happening. I haven’t really lived there since the pandemic. Hysteria came out when I was already in West Texas. So, my relationship to New York now is one of longing, I guess. But also, there is relief there too because it’s so much easier to live in West Texas. There is a lot less strain, but a ton of less surprise. Most likely, the next thing I write will be set in New York.
STREET: I was going to say, maybe you’ll do a spatial West Texas exploration of nature.
GROSS: Maybe so? I feel like I’m too new to it.
STREET: Back to Hysteria, I wanted to ask a little bit about the narrators’ parents who are therapists. I found some of those scenes the most difficult to read yet rewarding. I was left with these longing questions, and I was wondering how you built some of those familial characterizations. The opera scene for instance. . .
GROSS: There was quite a long sloth of time where the first chapter of the novel was in her childhood, and the opera scene appeared there. It was later on in revision that it was removed to the session with Freud, and I sort of lazily tried to plop in there, but my reviser was like, “You can’t just do that! You need to make it a conversation.” Then one of my thesis groupmates, Mike Tisely, had the insight to write the scene in backwards-order as if she’s recollecting it in reverse-order—as if she’s recounting what has happened. I thought that was incredibly intelligent as a suggestion. I guess this shows how vital I found feedback and how much it helped gauge my own imagination in this project. How piecemeal and collaborative even that one scene was, it changed so much from start to finish.
STREET: It’s interesting to prose the two parents together. There is such a coldness between them and their daughter.
GROSS: The entirety of the parents’ character constructions were like that too. Even when I sold the book to Unnamed Press, the parents were a little more Black and White and less nuanced? Again, with the help of my editor and her intelligent feedback, they became increasingly complex.
STREET: I’ve seen Hysteria compared to novels such as The Pisces or Luster, where female characters are spiraling from complex sexual difficulties. Another place I found your book was on “The Future of Literature” table at New York’s Strand.
GROSS: Yes, my friend sent me a picture of that!
STREET: You were next to authors like R.O Kwon and Garth Greenwell too, who we talked about earlier. Who are some authors you’re reading now?
GROSS: Well, reading during the pandemic has really suffered, I will admit. But a friend in Texas lent me this book The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw. Have you read it?
STREET: I have! It’s really good.
GROSS: I don’t normally enjoy collections of linked, short stories over novels because I enjoy getting attached and immersed into the characters. But it’s really great. It’s upending my belief about my own preference. I didn’t read The Pisces until after I drafted my book. I think because I was sort of afraid that there were going to be overlaps that would detach me from my own writing. Once I did read it, I was so excited by it. People have compared my work to Ottessa Moshfegh for similar reasons. I had read my Year of Rest and Relaxation while I was revising, but I waited to read Eileen until after. Throughout the writing of Hysteria, the authors I probably thought of most were Andre Aciman, Garth Greenwell, and Phillip Roth. I enjoy men writing about sex that I can eventually upend in my own head by writing from a woman’s perspective. Also, Nicholson Baker? Have you read Nicholson Baker?
STREET: Oh no, I haven’t.
GROSS: Oh, his sex-writing is like wild. The wackiest stuff. It’s just so degrading and great. I just really adore reading it. Basically, his books always have an unusual premise that he rises to the challenge of reading. There’s Vox, where the entire book is a phone-sex hotline. There’s The Fermata, where man has the power to stop time and he only uses it to look up women’s skirts. I mean it doesn’t age well at all. But I think the subversion is, I love repurposing this liberation for my own.
STREET: I have seen Vox before around New York bookstores, but I’ve been afraid. . .
GROSS: I listened to that one on audiobook and since the whole book is dialogue, I think that’s a great way to read it. I highly recommend it.
STREET: Do you find more inspiration (or power) in reading about sexuality from a masculine point of view?
GROSS: You know I realized that in retrospect. Since, Hysteria has come out, I read a lot of women doing sex-writing and enjoyed it. Maybe there is a part of me that wanted to create space within my own mind and process, so I wouldn’t be as influenced by other women writing about sex while I was trying to do it. Now that I’m done giving my own contribution, I do enjoy it more!
STREET: I only have one question left: what are you working on next? and I hope it’s set in a bright non-pandemic New York?
GROSS: I don’t think that I can answer that question right now because I’ve been working on something for a couple of years, but I think I might be at a point where it’s going to shift into a new version that I haven’t landed on yet. But so far it is set in New York. So, I can say that much at least.
Jessica Gross is the author of the novel Hysteria. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Longreads, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places.