Kristan Higgins's Reviews > Big Swiss

A bookseller recommended this one to me, and who am I to doubt a bookseller? (Thanks, Rachel at Beacon Street Books!) This is a weird and twisted story of Greta, a medical transcriptionist for a sex therapist in the small town of Hudson, New York. Greta lives in an old house with no heat, a hive of bees in the chimney and her drug-dealing best friend. Otherwise, it’s just her and her dog, who’s her soulmate (obviously). Greta loves her job, which gives her an opportunity to legally spy on her fellow Hudson residents. One of the patients she most likes is a woman she refers to as Big Swiss, and when they inevitably meet in real life, a relationship begins (quite sexual, and with very weird analogies).

Every character in the book is memorable (maybe a little too much). We have Om, the pompous, self-acclaimed sex therapist, Flavia, the repressed gynecologist, the privileged, constantly-reinventing-themselves townspeople of Hudson. Greta herself is rather mean-spirited, but her self-imposed distance from life is the result of her mother’s suicide, which she has never truly dealt with. She judges people with a malevolent humor, allowing her to keep her distance from the messy humans. Even so, her hope for true connection peeks through now and then. This is a book about trying to survive after trauma, and the ways we distract ourselves from some of the darkness in our lives. A literary darling for sure.