Greta has repressed significant details from her mother’s suicide.

Flavia endured a horrific assault that she insists is no big deal. And both women are still learning how to deal with the central tragedies of their lives. Flavia is married, a fact that she doesn’t hide but which is, obviously, a complication. Greta gives Flavia a fake name when they meet, and she doesn’t tell Flavia that she knows her deepest secrets. This relationship is defined by its intensity and by the ticking time bombs buried within it. Her job is to listen to recordings and write down what she hears, but she quickly develops a parasocial relationship with Om’s clients-not that different from a listener’s relationship to a podcaster or, for that matter, Mona’s imagined relationship with Terry Gross of “Fresh Air.” But Greta’s feelings for the client she calls “Big Swiss” are unusually intense, and a chance meeting at the dog park with this well-known stranger-whose real name is Flavia-turns into an affair. After quitting her job as a pharmacy tech and leaving her fiance, she moves from Los Angeles to Hudson, New York, and starts working as a transcriptionist for a sex therapist named Om. Beagin’s new main character is literally paid to eavesdrop on the therapy sessions of strangers. Her first two novels starred Mona, a woman whose job cleaning houses affords her a fascinating window into her clients’ lives and an idiosyncratic education in human behavior. (Feb.The author of Pretend I’m Dead (2018) and Vacuum in the Dark (2019) returns with another wonderfully off-kilter protagonist.īeagin loves weirdos-fully and unironically. This unconventional love story has a surplus of appeal from page one. When encountering another of the therapist’s patients and his wife at a coffee shop, Greta notes, “like most people in Hudson, they were better looking than average and dressed like boutique farmers.” Beagin is a gifted storyteller with a flair for the eccentric and a soft spot for a wayward soul. While the interpersonal intrigue is palpable, this is also very much a novel about place, full of alternately snide and affectionate commentary about the rapidly gentrifying town. At the dog park, Greta and Big Swiss (whose real name is Flavia) meet by chance, and romance between the two blossoms, complicated by the fact that Greta is privy to Big Swiss’s most private inner thoughts. Greta is working as a transcriptionist for a local sex therapist named Om when she is captivated by the voice of one of Om’s patients, a 30-something married woman whom she nicknames Big Swiss for her height and nationality, who used to live in Brooklyn. The protagonist, Greta, is in her 40s, living in a semi-derelict Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, N.Y., with her beloved dog, Piñón.

Beagin ( Vacuum in the Dark) delivers a delightfully off-kilter romantic comedy set in a Hudson Valley increasingly transformed by transplants from New York City.

Big swiss jen beagin