Study in Hysteria

Kathleen Collins

Publication date: February, 2024
Genre: Literary fiction
Paperback: ISBN: 978-3-98832-043-8​
eBook: ISBN: 978-3-98832-044-5

★★★★★ “A heartbreakingly beautiful debut.”
Sandra A. Miller, author of Wednesdays at One

In the middle of 1974, Flora is privileged and middle-aged in a liberation-hued America, and feels both compelled by and left out of the women’s movement. She finds it difficult to activate her limited supply of empathy as she contends with a clandestine and unlikely friendship, a worrisome health scare, a domineering and philandering psychiatrist husband or her own distant daughter.

Flora's secret foray into psychotherapy does nothing to halt the sense that there is a better life for her somewhere else, in some parallel existence. T hrough the continuum of psychological diagnoses, she is lost in the murky place between contentment and discontentment, normal and abnormal.

Is her state of mind a clinical, diagnosable condition, or common malaise? Perhaps she'll find out if she stops resisting to share herself with those who love her.