Congratulations to Kathleen Collins and Vine Leaves Press on the release of Study in Hysteria, a psychological portrait of a woman who senses that there is a better life for her somewhere else.
★★★★★ “Compelling, surprising, and witty... an exquisite novel about the painful consequences of repressing emotions, the deep rifts caused by the fear of revealing ourselves, and the unexpected ways the heart finds to heal. A heartbreakingly beautiful debut.” ~Sandra A. Miller, author of Wednesdays at One
Study in Hysteria
NEW RELEASE: February 13, 2024Genre: Literary Fiction
Paperback: $17.99
Ebook: $5.99
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. Through 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.
Praise for Study in Hysteria
★★★★★ “A nuanced psychological portrait of an indelible character and the complex era that shapes her... [an] intelligent, engrossing book.” ~Heidi Diehl, author of Lifelines
★★★★★ “In shimmering prose, Kathleen Collins gives us Flora, a woman who spends nearly a lifetime meeting–or not meeting–everyone's expectations without ever realizing she has deeply-held expectations of her own.” ~Stephanie Gangi, author of Carry the Dog and The Next
★★★★★ “Collins’s elegantly woven prose reads like a brocade of one woman’s feelings in a sexist world, a woman for whom silence is rebellion. Collins's psychological acuity manages to feel both classic and thoroughly contemporary.” ~Jason Tougaw, author of The Elusive Brain
About the Author
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. Study in Hysteria is her first novel. She is a professor and librarian at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and lives with her husband near the forest in the northernmost tip of the New York City borough of Manhattan. Learn more at katcoindustries.com.About the Publisher
Vine Leaves Press likes to blur the line between commercial and experimental works. They publish book-length vignette collections, writing reference books, short story collections, memoir/autobiography, and character-driven novels with a literary bent. Subscribe to the Vine Leaves Press newsletter to receive FREE advanced review copies of upcoming new releases, news about their authors and subscribers, and/or to read the monthly opinion column, SPILL IT! or a daily dose of 50-word stories. Learn more at VineLeavesPress.com.