She is a gynecologist who has survived a horrific assault, yet has nothing but contempt for what she calls “the trauma people.” What brings her to Om’s office, though, is that she has never in her 28 years experienced an orgasm. Big Swiss is an indelible character she’s beautiful yet deliberately unappealing, cold, blunt, and addicted to condiments. You can do a lot of character development very quickly if you include therapy transcripts in your novel, it turns out. Jen has worked as a transcriber herself, and Big Swiss’s plot revolves around transcription: Greta, 45 and drifting through life, works as a transcriber for Hudson’s leading sex therapist, a man who unapologetically goes by the name “Om.” (When Greta first meets Om, he’s wearing a felt fedora, along with “black eyeliner, a tasteful white linen tunic, and tight denim shorts.”) She quickly learns the secrets of just about everyone in town, including an Om patient she privately nicknames Big Swiss because she’s tall and, well, Swiss. We had to shout a little bit over the noise of someone tearing down a wall in her basement, so Jen started the conversation by apologizing for the noise to me and also to the person who would eventually transcribe our interview.
She reluctantly moved out of Dutch house when her friend sold it in 2019, then bought this house after selling her dad’s house when he died in 2021. Jodie Comer is adapting the book into a TV series for HBO that she’ll star in as the titular character, after winning a 14-way bidding war for film rights.īeagin was in a different - heated - house in Hudson when we talked, one she owns. February 7 brings readers her most exciting book yet: the idiosyncratic love story Big Swiss. Vacuum in the Dark, a sequel to Pretend I’m Dead, was published in 2019. The Whiting money plus the advance that Simon & Schuster paid for Pretend I’m Dead enabled Beagin to finally quit her job and write full-time. “I said, ‘That book’s really short,’ and they were like, ‘No, you deserve this.’ They kept saying that, ‘You deserve this.’” (When she wasn’t waitressing, cleaning houses was among the jobs Beagin held down over the years.) She did try to dissuade the caller. The foundation was honoring her first novel, Pretend I’m Dead, an idiosyncratic book narrated by a house cleaner who gets too involved with her clients. “I kept saying, ‘Writing foundation?’ We went back and forth like that for a while.” Beagin eventually accepted that she was among the 2017 recipients of a $50,000 grant for emerging writers.
“I was 47, and I’d been waitressing full-time for seven years, writing in the early mornings, and I was burnt out.” At first, she thought the Whiting Foundation was a scam.
When she got the call that would change her life completely, Jen Beagin was in the middle of using a hair dryer to warm up the freezing sheets of her bed in a beautiful but unheated 300-year-old Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, New York.
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