Study in Hysteria
"A heartbreakingly beautiful debut." Sandra A. Miller, author of Wednesdays at One
In the middle of 1974, Flora is privileged and middle-aged in a liberation-hued America, and feels both compelled by and left out of the women's movement. She finds it difficult to activate her limited supply of empathy as she contends with a clandestine and unlikely friendship, a worrisome health scare, a domineering and philandering psychiatrist husband or her own distant daughter.
Flora's secret foray into psychotherapy does nothing to halt the sense that there is a better life for her somewhere else, in some parallel existence. Through the continuum of psychological diagnoses, she is lost in the murky place between contentment and discontentment, normal and abnormal.
Is her state of mind a clinical, diagnosable condition, or common malaise? Perhaps she'll find out if she stops resisting to share herself with those who love her.
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Kathleen Collins is an experienced author and researcher who has studied and written about television, media history, popular culture and food. Her work has appeared in the magazines Working Woman and Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture and in the anthology Secrets & Confidences: The Complicated Truth About Women's Friendships (Seal Press: 2004). She has also written encyclopedia entries on a variety of media history topics. She has a Master's degree in journalism with a specialization in cultural reporting and criticism from New York University and a Master's degree in library science from Long Island University. For the past ten years, she has worked as an editorial researcher for a variety of publications including Glamour and Ladies' Home Journal. She is now a librarian and lives in Manhattan.
"Compelling, surprising, and witty, Study in Hysteria is the story of Flora Rose, a woman who struggles to understand her role as a wife and mother, as desperately as she seeks to understand herself. Married to Will, a confident psychiatrist who easily extracts his patients' darkest truths, Flora conceals her own secrets, including feelings of aimlessness and shame that quietly isolate her from the people she needs most. Collins has written an exquisite novel about the painful consequences of repressing emotions, the deep rifts caused by the fear of revealing ourselves, and the unexpected ways the heart finds to heal. A heartbreakingly beautiful debut." Sandra A. Miller, author of Wednesdays at One
"In Study in Hysteria, Kathleen Collins crafts a nuanced psychological portrait of an indelible character and the complex era that shapes her. In gorgeous prose, richly rendered and perfectly precise, Study in Hysteria explores how we come to know ourselves through our closest relationships as well as the broader social and cultural forces of our time. I loved reading and thinking about this intelligent, engrossing book." Heidi Diehl, author of Lifelines
"In shimmering prose, Kathleen Collins gives us Flora, a woman who spends nearly a lifetime meeting-or not meeting-everyone's expectations without ever realizing she has deeply-held expectations of her own. As she tries to navigate mid-century wife-and-motherhood, feminism takes hold of the world around her, and Flora too. Reading Study in Hysteria is like turning the pages of a photo album, showing how memory happens: first blurry and fragmented but ultimately revealing a clear and true imperative: live your life, now." Stephanie Gangi, author of Carry the Dog and The Next
"Set in the 1970s, Study in Hysteria is a thoroughly novelistic story of a woman's domestic confinement-subject to her psychiatrist husband's arch diagnoses. Flora Rose is heir to Henry James's Isabel Archer, Edith Wharton's Lily Bart, Sylvia Plath's Esther Greenwood-and distant, well-to-do cousin to All in the Family's Edith Bunker. Collins's elegantly woven prose reads like a brocade of one woman's feelings in a sexist world, a woman for whom silence is rebellion. Collins's psychological acuity manages to feel both classic and thoroughly contemporary." Jason Tougaw, author of The Elusive Brain: Literary Experiments in the Age of Neuroscience
