Let’s get Hysterical
Comedy writer Elissa Bassist wrote like a motherfucker in her debut memoir
Elissa Bassist is a Funny Woman. She edits the column for The Rumpus and her debut memoir from Hachette, Hysterical, shows it.
Get out your highlighters and favorite pens because it’s a book filled with lines and passages that will enrage, delight, and horrify — all with Bassist’s signature wit. It’s for those who say yes when they can’t say no, who smile when they want to scream. It’s for the “nice girls” and the “cool girls” and the people who are tired of the patriarchy. Mostly, it will help those who’ve felt silenced feel seen.
Even as a grown adult, a student of mine has a parent who calls me Jessica, and I haven’t figured out how to correct it while still being nice. Women must lie–even about their own names–to be perceived as polite, often to save their own lives. And this is just the internalized tip of the sexist iceberg.
We experience this sexism all the time, in big and small ways, like years ago when my iPhone autocorrected “Deepak Chopra” but ignored “oprah.” But not everyone notices, perhaps because these incidents are stored away on a giant private list called Fuck the Patriarchy.
What does someone do with all of these shitty facts? If you’re Bassist, then you write about them like a motherfucker… even if it feels like the political climate is more tenuous for people who speak about sexism and violence. Our culture of silencing women can be seen everywhere, even and especially in women’s magazines that supposedly aim to empower and not oppress.
Bassist risks writing about past trauma in this memoir that Roxane Gay calls “staggeringly good.” For women who speak about sexism and violence, it’s risky. I’m thinking of the Depp-Heard case that sprung from Amber Heard using her voice in her Washington Post essay and was sued for defamation, Jasmine Pierce got sued for “defaming” Aaron Glaser, Dr. Ford needed to move four times for fear of her safety after she spoke out, and the parts Bassist herself received about boyfriends and bosses, and all of those terrifying comments and doxxing threats after she published pieces from this book.
Throughout the memoir are gems that made me roll my eyes about the omnipresence of sexism and misogyny: the fourteenth Dalai Lama stated his successor could be a woman but only if she is “very, very attractive”; leg shaving was invented by Gillette to sell razors to women during the war; the many, many, many films and TV shows that are written, directed, and produced by men that objectify women and glorify violence against them — which often go on to win awards from male-dominated academies. The everyday platforms we use — email and social media and gig economy apps — are all designed, “run and overrun by men.” Lyft and Uber drivers make us feel unsafe and know our addresses; seatbelts, crosswalk signs, and toilets are designed for the average man’s body. Male philosophers are simply philosophers while female writers are… female writers. Even in romcoms and Disney princess films, Bassist points out, men talk the most. Bassist’s mother sums it up in the book: “It’s a man’s world.”
Is it ever a good time for a woman to speak up? To write about her life? To talk about the bad things men did? Hysterical is an example of writing that toes the line between being vulnerable about her experiences is a risk for its author who writes about bias and trauma that will make her visible.
