44 pages 1 hour read

Jen Beagin

Big Swiss

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023

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Themes

Physical and Psychological Trauma

Big Swiss explores the connections between physical and psychological trauma, as well as the long-term effects of these traumas when they are left untreated.

Big Swiss is a character who tries to confront her trauma and therefore overpower it. She doesn’t want her traumas to define her. She believes that people who do so are weak. Big Swiss rejects the stigma of the victim by reclaiming her narrative on her own terms. Big Swiss goes to Om for sex therapy, but he is interested in targeting her trauma as part of the reason she is having trouble with orgasming. Om notes that traumas follow his patients through their lives and often affects areas originally unrelated to the sources of their trauma. Big Swiss’s trauma is the horrific assault she experienced at Keith’s hands. She has a marriage, a good career, and a stable home. The assault did not define the way she viewed her life, though Om insinuates that her inability to be defined by her trauma is its own blockage. Her affair with Greta is separate from that trauma–it is not because of trauma that Big Swiss engages in a relationship with Greta.