Greta is refreshingly skeptical of therapy, or at least considers it an expensive, navel-gazing pastime of bored people. In their initial meeting, Om says, “Hudson is where the horny go to die.” The novel offers a satirical take on our therapy-obsessed culture, our need to prescribe meaning and labels to every banal event in our lives. Not by a yoga teacher, as his name would suggest, but by an unneutered therapy animal.” Om, as surmised by Greta, is equal parts horny charlatan and pop psychologist: “Om’s relationship-coaching style seemed reminiscent of getting hit on at a bar. So, what happens when you don’t read too much into your wounds? As it turns out, a lot of unhinged sex and the subsequent therapy needed to interrogate it.Īfter Big Swiss’s session with Om, Beagin introduces us to Greta, who, having survived a turbulent youth that included her mother’s suicide and her own broken engagement, has found herself in Upstate New York transcribing Om’s sex-therapy sessions for a living. After revealing this detail, Big Swiss casually advises her new sex therapist, “Also, don’t read into this too much.” She was also the victim of a brutal assault, and the perpetrator is set to be released from prison next month. Big Swiss is seeking counsel because, despite being married, she has never experienced an orgasm. If you try suggesting that they let go of their suffering, their victimhood, they act retraumatized,” says one of the characters - affectionately nicknamed Big Swiss - to her sex therapist, Om. “Trauma people are almost as unbearable to me as Trump people. In fact, the characters stubbornly resist victimhood. In the novel’s opening pages, everyone is maimed by trauma but disinterested in self-pity. In Big Swiss, trauma and sexual obsession intertwine to create a sprawling and delightful mess. Whatever happened to drama, for drama’s sake? Greta, the protagonist of Jen Beagin’s daring and biting new novel, might have the answer. It’s all so clinical and joyless: the romance and spectacle of our lives neatly squared away with diagnoses and prescriptions.
My personality is apparently a confluence of gaping childhood wounds. I’m beckoned to take a quiz to identify my attachment style. Every day on Instagram, I encounter pastel-colored infographics encouraging me to enforce boundaries, unpack trauma, expel toxic relationships, and have more fulfilling sex. WE LIVE IN an era preoccupied with trauma and sex both have become problems we can’t seem to solve.
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