Authors Interviewing Characters: Kathleen Collins

February 3, 2024 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

About the book: Study in Hysteria

In the middle of 1974, Flora is privileged and middle-aged in a liberation-hued America, and she feels both compelled by and left out of the women’s movement. She is burdened by psychic conflict, a domineering and philandering husband, a distant daughter, a secret foray into psychotherapy, and a clandestine and unlikely friendship. The novel’s title alludes to Freud’s 1895 case study collection of five women. The central theme of the novel is distilled in Freud’s directive to a patient that the goal of analysis is “turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness” rather than the wholesale erasure of suffering. Through the continuum of psychological diagnoses, Flora is lost in the murky place between contentment and discontentment, normal and abnormal.

Kathleen Collins’s interview with Flora Rose

KC: Your sister Ruth told me that I wouldn’t get very far in a conversation with you. She said you’re fiercely private.

FR: [smiles] I guess it seems that way. I just don’t talk a lot. I find it tires me easily.

KC: Sounds like you’re a classic introvert.

FR: Now you sound like my husband, diagnosing me.

KC: I apologize. You’re right.

FR: Don’t worry. I’m only joking. And you’re right. He is usually wrong.

KC: I’m sure it’s challenging at times to be married to a psychiatrist.

FR: [nods and smiles]

KC: So you don’t agree with Ruth, that you are very private?

FR: It depends on how you define private. It’s not that I want to keep secrets or don’t want anyone to know anything about me. But I don’t disclose much. So I come off as guarded or shy, perhaps.

KC: Do you wish that talking weren’t so exhausting?

FR: Yes. Sometimes. I wish I could gab like my sisters, like my friend Grace. Like my granddaughter! It seems like an enjoyable activity. Such a normal, acceptable, expected thing to do. But it seems I was absent on the day they were doling out volubility. And small talk is quite boring to me. The patience it takes. Stating the obvious, over and over again. I just see a conversation laid out before me and I get tired just anticipating it. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say or don’t know what to say. It just doesn’t make its way out of my head very often. So I suppose my husband has a point when he suggests there’s something disordered about me. Something neurotic.

KC: That hardly seems like a disorder to me. It’s your personality. Lots of people are quiet.

FR: Quiet isn’t valued in our society. In libraries and churches, maybe, but not in general life.

KC: What sorts of things are you not saying? What’s in your head?

FR: My mind is very active. I think I think too much. I have thoughts and ideas about everything. Opinions. Sometimes very unequivocal opinions. I feel so right about something. The more right I feel, the more likely I am to clam up. I fear how it might come out. Like a fire-breathing dragon.

KC: Opinions about what kinds of things?

FR: Just about everything. I am easily irritated by other people’s behavior – when they don’t throw their trash in the receptacle, when they ask a question they already know the answer to, when they are unaware of the people around them, most noises they make. So I would probably be shouting at people to stop doing things, correcting them. And because the anger and resentment had been brewing, it would come out in a torrent. It wouldn’t be ladylike at all.

KC: Do you feel a pressure to be ladylike?

FR: Well, of course.

KC: Do you think that’s part of what fuels your anger at people who don’t conform or behave well? The pressure on women to look and act a certain way?

FR: Ha! Now you sound like my psychologist.

KC: [smiles]

FR: The answer is yes.

KC: Has seeing a psychologist been useful for you?

FR: I don’t think I’ve given the project enough time to answer that fairly, but so far I am not the ideal client. I clam up in her presence, too. I’m resistant. I know this because I was a social worker for umpteen years. I know resistance when I see it. [laughs]

KC: If you’re so conscious of it, don’t you have any interest in pushing beyond it? To get to whatever it is you were hoping to accomplish by seeing a psychologist in the first place?

FR: I am not sure what I want to accomplish. I’m not sure why I sought out the services of a professional. It was an impulsive move. I think I just wanted to rebel and do something my husband wouldn’t know about. And no, I am not the type to have an affair. I have no interest in that.

KC: So the psychologist scheme isn’t fulfilling that desire?

FR: Not really.

KC: You’re very self-aware. Maybe therapy isn’t exciting or adventurous enough to feel rebellious.

FR: I am definitely not seeking excitement or adventure.

KC: What else could it be?

FR: Maybe nothing. Just the idea that there is supposed to be more.

KC: You’re pretty talkative and open with me. So you have the potential.

FR: There’s the rub. I can’t seem to do it on command. Just when people most want me to respond and engage with them, it’s as if I’m withholding, like I am addicted to not speaking.

KC: Forgive me for saying this, but it also sounds a little bit like a version of depression.

FR: This idea has been suggested to me.

KC: And? What do you think?

FR: It might be. Freud and my psychologist and my own gut have told me that depression is anger turned inward.

KC: I’ve heard that, too. What do you think?

FR: It makes a kind of sense. In a very simplistic way.

KC: So, by simple logic, the cure would be to let the anger out.

FR: Yes, I have fantasies of this sometimes. Not anything as gruesome as bloodletting, but maybe as violent and destructive as a volcano.

KC: Do the fantasies provide any relief?

FR: A little.

KC: Like little mini rebellions?

FR: [smiles]

KC: Don’t you think the other women in your life would feel relieved to hear that you feel this way, because maybe they share some of your feelings?

FR: I confess that what I want is to be understood without having to explain myself to anyone or to join a consciousness-raising group or to really even change anything. I’d be happy to lay my insides bare for all to see, let people just peer in and say, “Oh yes, I see, that’s is what drives her. It all makes sense now.” And then they could settle down and leave me be. Let me wallow in my common unhappiness.

KC: I see. How about if we both just sit here and wallow quietly for a bit?

FR: That would be nice. Thank you.

Publisher’s site with buy options: https://www.vineleavespress.com/study-in-hysteria-by-kathleen-collins.html

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Kathleen Collins’s nonfiction books include Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows, Dr. Joyce Brothers: The Founding Mother of TV Psychology, and a memoir, From Rabbit Ears to the Rabbit Hole: A Life with Television. Her work has also appeared in such outlets as the Journal of Popular Film & Television, Critical Studies in Television, and Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies. She is a professor and librarian at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and produces and co-hosts a podcast called Indoor Voices that features scholars and creatives at the City University of New York. Study in Hysteria is her first novel.