HYSTERICAL is a memoir of a voice, about how a woman’s voice develops (or doesn’t) in a culture where men talk and women shut up. This expectation of a woman’s silence made me sick.

Not to be dramatic but between 2016 and 2018 I saw over twenty medical professionals for a variety of mysterious ailments. 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, and a voice that dogs could hear but people couldn't.

Every sick person will be asked, “Have you tried acupuncture?” I did. And the acupuncturist suggested that some of my physical pain may be caged fury expressing itself via symptoms, and that treating my voice would treat the problem. Long memoir short: it did.

How did I lose my voice? Growing up, my family, boyfriends, school, work, and television expected the same from a woman: less is more. I was called hormonal and insane for speaking my mind. I was accused of overreacting and of playing victim for having unexplained pain. I was ignored or rebuked--like women throughout history--for using my voice “inappropriately” by conveying sadness or suffering or anger or joy.

Because of this, I said “yes” when I meant “no.” I didn’t tweet #MeToo. I never spoke without fear of being "too emotional." And I felt rage, but like a good woman, I repressed it.

In HYSTERICAL, I explain how girls and women internalize and perpetuate directives about our voice, making it hard to “just speak up” and “burn down the patriarchy.” But then our silence hurts us more than anything we could ever say.

HYSTERICAL is both a memoir and a primer on new ways to think about voice, about where it’s being squashed and where it needs amplification.

HYSTERICAL has it all: a medical mystery, medical gaslighting, regular gaslighting, self-gaslighting, receipts on just how sexist the world is, spilled tea on shitty media men, a needed differentiation between mental illness and “crazy ex-girlfriend psycho bitches,” a scathing indictment of The Little Mermaid, an answer to the question “Why do we hate women’s voices?,” an alternative model to a media landscape obsessed with raped women and dead girls, some science on how emotional pain becomes physical, literally all the reasons why women don’t say what they’re thinking, a bunch of talking cures for those who have been silenced, and more. A lot more.

Within I break my own silences and call on readers to do the same—to unmute their voice, to listen to it above all others, and to use it again without regret.

PRAISE

“Funny and furious and sharp and bursting with everything we’re urged to hold inside, Elissa Bassist’s HYSTERICAL is a god damn delight.”
―Rebecca Traister

“I LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE Elissa's writing. That was five loves....Quite a special, strong, funny voice."
―Joey Soloway, creator/writer/director/Emmy-award winner of Transparent

"One of the qualities I appreciated most…is the way the author subtly and gracefully links her deeply personal life story to compelling questions about women’s sexuality, literature, history. We never notice her doing the connecting; the larger themes and analysis are seamlessly woven into the intimate story. She makes us think and care about not simply what happened to her, but about women’s bodies, our continued detachment from our own desire, our own complicity in the culture of sexual violence…This artful, moving work of creative nonfiction transcends the self, while keeping us rooted in the most intimate of stories.”
―Danzy Senna, bestselling author of Caucasia

“It is no secret that the medical field ignores, underfunds, and looks away from issues that affect women. It also tends to layer new words on old allegations that women’s symptoms are manifestations of hysteria instead of attempting to understand them. Bassist…has bravely used the story of her body as it has been overwritten by insufficient, inefficient medical discourses to offer answers for women who feel as if they inhabit ‘a body that didn’t make sense to science, a psyche that didn’t make sense to mankind in general.’ Like Tillie Olson, Susan Bordo, and so many feminist theorists before her, Bassist explores the silencing acts that keep women small. She also explores the ways in which finding a voice requires women to take up space in ways that transgress expectations by insisting on the female body’s inherent rightness—something society still does not believe. VERDICT: Disruptive, tender, and beautiful, this book is a reversal of women’s apologies and a demand for more.”
—Library Journal, starred review

“[Bassist] started having issues with her physical voice, and through looking for why that was happening and the health issues around that, came to understand how much of it was tied to trauma and her own efforts to kind of keep herself quiet over the years. [HYSTERICAL] touches on so many things women deal with in the world. It weaves the science in — in a great way where you're both reading about what this woman has gone through, but you're learning something at the same time.”
—Daisy Rosario, What’s Making Us Happy: Recommendations from NPR’s Pop Culture Radio Hour