Jessica Gross On The Fascinatingly Bizarre World Of Her New Novel
In Jessica Gross’ darkly comic horror novel Open Wide, a radio journalist perplexed by human behavior discovers exactly how close she can get to her new boyfriend. Olive is incredibly bright and funny, but she’s always struggled with maintaining romantic relationships. She’s resorted to secretly recording her conversations, poring over each interaction to analyze what social cues she’s missing and hopefully uncover the root of her relationship problems. When she meets Theo, a charming brain surgeon with a unique interest in human organs, it appears that she’s finally met someone who will embrace her for exactly who she is, idiosyncrasies and all. Despite finding someone she can truly be emotionally intimate with, Olive obsesses over the idea of getting even closer to her new boyfriend. Specifically, Olive grows fascinated by the gap between Theo’s teeth, and the alarming possibility that it’s perhaps big enough for someone to slip in between and burrow inside his body. Critics have heaped praise on Gross’ extraordinary novel. In their starred review, Kirkus called Open Wide “a rom-com inside a body horror story, or a philosophical examination of love as obsession.” Meanwhile Amazon named Open Wide as one of their Editor’s Picks and wrote that “Gross’ sophomore novel is sure to enchant, hypnotize, and make you feel the wide range of emotions that only the messiness of being alive can provoke.” Gross spoke with us about turning the dial up of elements of her personality, making characters more weird, and how her book evolved over the course of the writing process.
I found Olive so funny and intriguing, and really liked spending time with her throughout the book. I wanted to hear you talk about how she ended up as the protagonist?
My approach was to take certain elements of my own personality—my psyche, my struggles—and give them to the character. Then through the writing and revision process I allowed her to morph from the seeds that were like me. But then, of course, she’s in really different situations and makes really different choices. Through the writing process she becomes a different person than me, but from the same seed. My approach was to let her have some of my own qualities—obviously not all of them—and let those flourish in different soil and see what they’d turn into. I also turned up the volume on those qualities by however many decibel levels I did, because she’s a fairly extreme person. So yeah, whatever neuroses she has, I may or may not have. Like a fraction, I would say. (laughs)
She has a very specific relationship with her mom that, from your acknowledgements, seems very different than the relationship you have with your own parents. Are those different dynamics fun to explore with a character that springs from you, doing the kind of retroactive work to figure out how this character ended up like this?
Very much so. A lot of people struggle with boundary issues, which is one way to say what Olive’s struggle is with her mother. I got to give her mother a sort of sinister flavor that is certainly not part of my own upbringing. The mother in the book has a bizarre— not to spoil it—relationship with Olive’s partner, which is something, thank God, I’ve never experienced and was instead something I got to make up and play with. Fiction is fun. It’s fun to get to invent things on the page and for people to act in ways that are really outside of the social norms that we all try our best to live by. You get to play around with really out of the box behavior.
One thing that I think adds to the sinister aspect of the mom character is how reasonable she is. She’s always making good points when she’s justifying her actions.
That’s such a good point. She’s definitely somebody on first or second meeting you’re like, “This is a really charming, wonderful person.” But that’s how it is with so many people. Not everybody, obviously, but sometimes you learn someone has a temper and you’re like, “Really?” People have a lot of capacity to hide what they do in private.
Olive has such a cool job, where she produces and hosts a radio show where she talks with writers about their works in progress. These interviews, where fictional authors discuss the creative process and their bodies of work, are especially fun to read. Can you talk about how this came into the book?
I used to interview writers for different publications. I loved doing these interviews and getting to talk to authors who I really admired. And then to be paid for it? It was an incredible thing to get to do. It just sounded really fun to me to play with that in the book, to give Olive that job and then get to see her in that other dimension. The element of her show grew out of my own personal frustrations. I remember once I was pitching an editor a piece I wanted to write about how annoying it was that everything had to be so timely—basically what the premise of Olive’s show is—that everything has to be tied to such a particular peg. The author is relevant for a couple of weeks, there are a million pieces that say a lot of similar things, and then the author goes into hiding. It’s not until the next book that they’re interviewed again. The editor said, “It sounds like you’re just personally annoyed as to having to write to certain pegs.” I was like, “That is true! I am!” But it stayed with me. That was surely more than a decade ago, but I thought, “Why don’t I give my character the luck of being able to circumvent this news cycle thing that is such a part of writing for periodicals? It’d be nice to be able to give her a job that gets into the mess of writing, and it’s sort of fitting for her because she’s very into the innards and mess.”
She’s also really good at her job. A lot of times I thought, “Oh that’s a really good question.”
I didn’t want her to be a pitiable character at all. It’s really nice to see her be competent and smart and charming, at least in this role. It gives more depth and dimension to her character.
I wanted to talk about Theo also. He presents as this almost flawless romantic prospect when we first meet him, and then we realize he’s got more layers to him. He seems like someone who can totally accept Olive for who she is.
The book started in a very different place than where it ended up landing. It was a story about three friends from college who are now in their thirties. Olive was still the narrator, and she was having a romance with one of her college friends’ boyfriends. I kept getting stuck, and when my agent read it, she suggested excising the two other female characters and making the story just about the more interesting characters of Olive and the guy. Basically I had these two protagonists and had to build out the character of Theo. He started as sort of a dreamy romcom lead, and through the writing and revision process became a more proper match for Olive. I remember feedback from my editors in the vein of, “Why would this sort of perfect, normal hunk fall in love with this incredibly bizarre, very needy woman? His weird needs to match her weird, even if it’s a different flavor of weird.” We collaborated to make him more bizarre in his way, AKA also more human, so that was a fun process.
The book is a little over 250 pages and is such a lean and propulsive read. I was curious to hear you talk about how you landed on the economical way you tell the story.
I think this is just how I write. I would love to be a more Proustian writer, that’s a pipe dream of mine. But my natural tendency is to be more economical, as you described it. In fact, for me this was long, because my first book was much shorter. It’s a really short book. It was like 50,000 words. And that was the goal in my mind. I wanted this to be a little more substantial, to move through more time, and be a more substantial read. For me this was long. Maybe in the future I can see how long I can go. But I guess we all have our tendencies and my tendency is to write briskly, as you said.
When I interviewed Laura Sims last year, she talked about her love of the “down and dirty novel.” Since then, I’ve been aware of how fun it is to read something of this length, when you’re plunged into a new world for a short period of time and then thrown out of it.
I think it’s probably my reading preference too. I love a slim volume, as they say. I think I wouldn’t write in a Proustian way, because it’s not my natural tendency, and thus it seems like a challenge I should force myself to pursue. We always want to be able to do what’s harder for us. (laughs)
This wasn’t a connection I had made before, but your book calls to mind the the movie Together, which I haven’t seen. Are you aware of it?
I haven’t seen it either. I have to admit, even though I wrote what is apparently a horror novel, I do not watch much horror because it scares me.
It seems like it’s dealing with similar issues, like the desire to merge with your partner and transgressing boundaries. Why do you think right now these themes are so fascinating to us, or is it something that’s always been of interest to people?
I don’t know that I can speak on it with tremendous authority, but one thing is that we’re living in an incredibly alienating era between social media and AI. There was the pandemic which forced us into quarantine, and now there’s technology which gives us the gift/curse of not really having to exit our houses that much. We’re not forced to interact with people, and that’s a huge loss, I think. Perhaps, if there is a rise in this kind of material right now as a sort of wish fulfillment, just wanting to be close. There’s a lot of hurdles to reaching out to other people. I think it was nice when it was part of the natural fabric of life. You had to go to a store to buy some things, you had to talk to somebody at the cash register to buy it. Now you don’t have to, so you don’t get to. Personally, I really miss having more interaction with people just in the course of my life. I imagine other people feel the same way. Maybe the endpoint of that desire for more contact and closeness with other human beings is thinking of people physically merging their bodies.
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