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August 19, 2020
Jessica Gross's Playlist for Her Novel "Hysteria"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Jessica Gross's novel Hysteria is a dark, funny, and wholly engaging debut. Easily one of my favorite books of the year.
Courtney Maum wrote of the book:
"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."
In her own words, here is Jessica Gross's Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Hysteria:
My debut novel, Hysteria, centers on a woman in her early twenties in Brooklyn who is not doing so hot. She’s full of overwhelming desire and shame, masochism and mania. Her grip on reality is…tenuous. Her parents are cognitive behavioral therapists, focused more on symptoms than what underlies them (including the intricacies of their daughter’s emotional life). They are definitely not fans of psychoanalysis. So when the narrator becomes convinced her bartender is Sigmund Freud, it’s the manifestation of a lifetime of fantasizing about him as the antithesis to her parents. Freud is, to her mind, the one who would understand her.
Or is he actually Freud? As I wrote, I hoped to embed the reader so far inside the narrator’s psyche that this would remain an open question. The Freud of Hysteria shares certain similarities with the man, including his relationship to music.
1) Beethoven’s 5th Symphony
When, in Hysteria, Freud shows up at a party in Manhattan, my narrator stands near him, eavesdropping. One of the people in his circle, a woman desperate to impress, starts cringily singing a Beethoven symphony. Freud cuts her off, telling her he hates instrumental music—which the real Freud really did, so much so that he demanded his mother remove his younger sister’s piano. She complied. As Joel Whitebook describes in Freud: An Intellectual Biography, instrumental music aroused powerful feelings that Freud, detestably, could not control. The narrator’s father, curiously, has the same aversion to instrumental music as Freud; she recognizes the Beethoven symphony because her father forbade her mother to play it when he was home.
2) “Charlotte! Albert est de retour!” from Werther, composed by Jules Massenet
Freud could enjoy the opera: the librettos accompanying the music defanged its power over him. The narrator’s father seems to have a similar orientation. On one memorable occasion during her childhood, her parents invited her along to see Werther at the Metropolitan Opera House. (The opera is based on The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, of whom Freud was a huge fan.) In the final aria of Act I, Werther, who has fallen in love with Charlotte, urges her to stay loyal to her oath to marry her fiancé Albert—“But I will die of it!” Later, in an extended conversation (analytic session) with Freud, the narrator recalls for him the feelings that Werther’s despair called up in her. In researching the novel, I went to see Werther at the Met: I was lucky enough to have met someone who worked there in a knife skills class. He not only got me a ticket, but set me up with a backstage tour, through which I was able to get my hands on program from the Met’s 1999 production of Werther—around the time my narrator would have gone to see it as a kid.
3) “A Sunday Kind of Love” by Etta James
It’s noonish on a Saturday when my narrator first sees the bartender she becomes convinced is Freud. The bar is playing an Etta James song, “scratchy, like a digital recording overlaid with turntable static.” I don’t name the song in the book, but I imagine it’s “A Sunday Kind of Love,” my favorite of hers (and choosing is hard). In not naming a particular song, I wanted to leave room for readers to project their own most beloved Etta James track.
4) “Work” by Rihanna feat. Drake
What I imagine this bar plays at night.
5) “By Your Side” by Raf Rundell
I asked a few friends who’d read Hysteria for music they felt captured the book’s tone, and this, a recommendation from my friend Genevieve, was one of my favorite suggestions. It’s full of intense longing—painful longing, if you want to hear it that way—which, for all her bad behavior, is my narrator’s primary affliction.
6) “Bad Self Portraits” by Lake Street Dive
Holy shit do I love this song. I played it so much driving to a cousin’s wedding last summer that my brother and sister-in-law begged me to stop. Tonally, it’s a little upbeat for my narrator’s self-destructive, ragefully sad mood, but the central image—"I'm taking bad self portraits / of a lonely woman”—fits her perfectly.
7) “(There’s Gotta Be) More To Life” by Stacie Orrico
Unlike my narrator, when I was just out of college, I was not careening from one disaster to the next (too type-A), nor did I become convinced my bartender was Freud. But, like her, I did live in a duplex apartment in Gowanus, and I was also very, very young. Hysteria isn’t set in 2007, but as I wrote, I spent a lot of time mentally revisiting that year. On the F-train ride home to Brooklyn after happy hour, tipsy on saccharine margaritas and the particular freedom of pre-recession New York City youth, heading from work at a startup with my beloved new friends to a home shared with my beloved college friends, I’d blast music through my iPod headphones as the train surfaced at Smith-Ninth, the glorious sunset bursting into view. The recession hit; my parents split up; my college boyfriend and I broke up; the startup fired almost everyone who worked there. So the mood shifted, and not just because I got older. But, for a while, the soundtrack stayed the same, the songs that had amplified my euphoria now offering an escape. I don’t imagine my narrator listening to the same bands I did then—Arcade Fire, The National, MGMT—but I imagine her on the subway, seeking escape through music as the stations blur past. I can see her listening to this Stacie Orrico song my roommate introduced me to last year: the escapist pop rhythms underlying the plea for more, for happiness.
8) Anything played on the musical saw
After a pivotal and emotional conversation with her parents, the narrator descends the subway steps to come across a man playing the musical saw. She loathes the saw and its “high-pitched wailing, the most mournful sound I’d ever heard.” My decade-plus of confrontations with the saw on New York’s subway platforms has incited in me a similar loathing. The sound is so primal and painful! I have to wonder if there’s not a bit of Freud in me, reacting disdainfully—i.e., fearfully—to music that makes me feel.
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 (2017) and the 14th Street Y (2015-16), 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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