Published in 2022
256 pages
Elissa Bassist edits the Funny Women column on The Rumpus. She writes cultural and personal criticism, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Marie Claire, Creative Nonfiction, NewYorker.com, The Cut, and more, a lot more, including in the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, edited by Roxane Gay. She teaches humor writing at The New School, Catapult, 92NY, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and more, and she is probably her therapist’s favorite.
What is this book about?
Equal parts medical mystery, cultural criticism, and rallying cry, writer Elissa Bassist shares her journey to reclaim her authentic voice in a culture that doesn’t listen to women.
Between 2016 and 2018, Elissa Bassist saw over twenty medical professionals for a variety of mysterious ailments. Bassist 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. But then an acupuncturist suggested some of her physical pain could be caged fury finding expression, and that treating her voice would treat the problem. It did.
Growing up, Bassist’s family, boyfriends, school, work, and television had the same expectation for a woman’s voice: less is more. She was called dramatic and insane for speaking her mind; she was accused of overreacting and playing victim for having unexplained physical pain; she was ignored or rebuked like women throughout history for using her voice “inappropriately” by expressing sadness or suffering or anger or joy.
Because of this, she said “yes” when she meant “no”; she didn’t tweet #MeToo; and she never spoke without fear of being “too emotional.” So, she felt rage, but like a good woman, repressed it. In Hysterical, Bassist explains how girls and women internalize and perpetuate directives about their voice, making it hard to emote or “just speak up” and “burn down the patriarchy.” But her silence hurt more than anything she could ever say. Hysterical is a memoir of a voice lost and found, and a primer on new ways to think about a woman’s voice, where it’s being squashed and where it needs amplification. Bassist breaks her own silences and calls on others to do the same—to unmute their voice, listen to it above all others, and use it again without regret.
