“I will send you his number in case he tries to kill me. LOL.”
This is a text I sent to a friend recently about a man I rejected who would not stop calling me 10, 15, then 20 times a day. At intervals, he’d message, “I’m outside your apartment”, and when I looked through the peephole, nothing. He’d make future threats: “I’ll be at your door at 6pm.” I spent that evening wandering around in the cold until 7.30pm knowing that he was impatient and would never wait that long.
I didn’t tell anyone as this was happening; it felt inevitable, normal, non-eventful. It wasn’t until I was washing the dishes after a meal that I realised the threat had become embodied. My friend tapped me on the shoulder to ask where the tinfoil was for leftovers and I screamed at an astral level. In what must have been only four seconds of screaming, I did not know where I was, did not register my friend’s face or body, and felt like I was listening to my scream, not actually producing it.
I relate to Bassist’s trek through professionals and I know millions of other women will too
In Hysterical by Elissa Bassist, we are invited to tune in to the terror of being a woman. At its extreme, it’s a body killed, but Bassist expertly detects the vibrations of localised deaths across the could-be corpse: a head that implodes from migraine, a cervix threshed like a crop, a throat choked. Her body and voice are reviewed expensively and expansively by an acupuncturist, an allergist, a bagel-shop owner, an ENT, a gastroenterologist, a GP, a herbalist, a massage therapist, a nephrologist, a neurologist, an OCD specialist, an occupational therapist, an ophthalmologist, an orthopaedic hand surgeon, a physical therapist, a psychopharmacologist, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a radiologist and a rehabilitation spine specialist. Each external expert enters Bassist’s body through their respective voice.
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I relate to Bassist’s trek through professionals and I know millions of other women will too. After a man raped me in my final year at university, I showed up at the hospital bleeding and the next morning my appendix was removed. The surgeon came to me later that day and disclosed that my appendix was swollen but not that swollen and a little pink but I probably hadn’t had appendicitis. He signed me out and I returned to college and my part-time job the following week. In the years to come, I’d be erroneously diagnosed with bipolar disorder, colitis, Crohn’s disease, polycystic ovaries and vulvodynia, all forming a band of nameless pain that just kept screaming.
Bassist writes: “I had what millions of American women had: pain that didn’t make sense to doctors, a body that didn’t make sense to science, a psyche that didn’t make sense to mankind in general.”
The book is packed with statistics and quotes of other people’s voices. It undercuts her position that women need to stop sourcing authority from the outside
Even though Bassist’s voice is sharp, secure and slick in a lot of Hysterical, I longed for more of it. The book is packed with statistics and quotes of other people’s voices. It undercuts her position that women need to stop sourcing authority from the outside. A further criticism is that Hysterical is at risk of being a book about men and what they do to women. I would have loved to read more about collaboration with women that exiles the “I will tell you who I am by telling you who I’m not”. These cliff-edge moments are often transcended when Bassist writes without holding her breath and lets her phrases rasp and roll.
Towards the end of the book (in my opinion this should have happened much sooner), she writes that a teenage girl she babysat for died by suicide. I wanted her to stay with this for a few pages, but after a paragraph she moves to celebrity suicide deaths (Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain) and later she writes: “And in April 2018, the forever-fourteen-year-old jumped out the window for a reason no one will ever know.”
Except, I don’t believe Bassist in this line. She may not know the details, but she knows a fragrance of the reason and clarifies this in her closing chapter: “What I meant by I want to die because I can’t write was that being inarticulate – being incomprehensible, being unspoken, having a subpar voice – was a life not worth living, and I felt, in some sense, dead already, or that having a voice but not using it would be the death of me.”
The gift to the reader is that Bassist writes exceptionally well and we are lucky to hear her hysterical voice.
Sarah Byrne is a writer. She lives between Cork and Paris
