After revealing this detail, Big Swiss casually advises her new sex therapist, “Also, don’t read into this too much.” She was also the victim of a brutal assault, and the perpetrator is set to be released from prison next month. Big Swiss is seeking counsel because, despite being married, she has never experienced an orgasm.

If you try suggesting that they let go of their suffering, their victimhood, they act retraumatized,” says one of the characters - affectionately nicknamed Big Swiss - to her sex therapist, Om. “Trauma people are almost as unbearable to me as Trump people. In fact, the characters stubbornly resist victimhood. In the novel’s opening pages, everyone is maimed by trauma but disinterested in self-pity. In Big Swiss, trauma and sexual obsession intertwine to create a sprawling and delightful mess. Whatever happened to drama, for drama’s sake? Greta, the protagonist of Jen Beagin’s daring and biting new novel, might have the answer. It’s all so clinical and joyless: the romance and spectacle of our lives neatly squared away with diagnoses and prescriptions. My personality is apparently a confluence of gaping childhood wounds.

I’m beckoned to take a quiz to identify my attachment style. Every day on Instagram, I encounter pastel-colored infographics encouraging me to enforce boundaries, unpack trauma, expel toxic relationships, and have more fulfilling sex. WE LIVE IN an era preoccupied with trauma and sex both have become problems we can’t seem to solve.

Big swiss jen beagin review