In Jen Beagin’s wildly entertaining third novel Big Swiss, a sex therapist’s transcriptionist falls in love with a client.

Greta has just relocated from Los Angeles to the rapidly gentrifying Hudson, New York—a town where people were “better looking than average and dressed like boutique farmers.” Accordingly, she moves into a bee-infested Dutch farmhouse owned by a weed dealer. In her new job listening to the recorded sessions of a dopey sex therapist named Om and writing down everything she hears, Greta feels connected to a gynecologist she affectionately calls Big Swiss—she’s tall and from Switzerland—as both women are repressing major traumas. 

One day at the dog park, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice and strikes up a conversation. Big Swiss, who it turns out is named Flavia, is instantly at ease around Greta, feeling Greta intuitively “knows her,” which Greta does from listening to her therapy sessions—a fact Greta conceals as the two begin an explosive affair. As one could predict, things end badly. But in a mostly fun way. 

Killing Eve’s Jodie Comer is already attached to star as Flavia in an HBO adaptation after a competitive media battle against 14 other bidders. The television bidding war didn’t surprise me as Big Swiss has a bingeable quality. Not only is Beagin hysterically funny, but the will-they-or-won’t-they tension keeps the pages flipping, while more serious questions about femininity and trauma simmer underneath. 

Over email, I spoke with Beagin about writing this off-kilter masterpiece. 

First off, Big Swiss is the best novel I’ve read in ten years. It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me insanely envious of your talent. Can you tell me a little bit about how the idea developed?

It started when a friend of mine bought a 1737 Dutch farmhouse in Hudson and invited me to stay with her for a week. I ended up staying three years. She rented me the former living room for $500 a month. While it wasn’t the easiest house to live in—it was in fact uninsulated and full of bees, and she had two mini-donks who liked to hang out in the kitchen—I managed to write my second novel there. I didn’t start writing Big Swiss until after I’d moved out, but the setting kind of wrote itself. In the novel, I made the house slightly more dilapidated, though not by much, and introduced a few more characters: Piñon the dog, Walter the rooster, the committee of black vultures. Unlike Greta and Sabine, we fled to Mexico each winter to get warm and to go to the dentist, where I had three very affordable root canals. 

Then, also, it’s this town I live in. Hudson really is this gossipy and art-campy, and you really are likely to overhear intimate details about people you know, or sort of know, or know by sight, while waiting in line at the post office. A friend of mine once said that if you hear something spicy about someone at the top of Warren (the main drag), it only takes two minutes for it to travel to the bottom of Warren. 

Your main character Greta is a transcriptionist for a sex therapist. I love how you included the transcriptions, sections that read like a play or screenplay. Can you talk about writing them? 

I worked as a transcriber for a couple years when I first started writing fiction in my mid-thirties. A friend of mine had his own business and I transcribed interviews and lectures, usually pretty dry, i.e., not sex therapy sessions, but I learned a lot about how people talk and how to listen carefully, and now my books are about 70% dialogue. In my previous novel, Terry Gross did a lot of work for me as my protagonist’s imaginary friend, which allowed me to fill the book with conversation, but the transcripts in Big Swiss did even more work, because there are no dialogue or action tags, or any kind of stage directions, and for that reason they were pretty exhilarating to write. 

Without giving too much away, can you explain why Greta is so compelled by Big Swiss?

Well, I hesitate to bring this up because I’m worried I’ll sound like I’m in a cult, but are you familiar with the Enneagram? It’s a supposedly pretty ancient system of personality typing. I first learned about it in my twenties, when it was kind of fringe, but apparently it’s fully mainstream now and popular with teenagers. Anyway, Big Swiss is Type 8, aka The Challenger. You always know when a Type 8 enters a room. They have giant auras. They’re charismatic, opinionated, willful, and terrified of weakness (in themselves or others). They’re also allergic to self-pity, so they’re often high achievers. When unhealthy, they become bossy, controlling, sometimes tyrannical. Greta, on the other hand, is Type 2, aka The Giver, which is the opposite of Type 8. I know she doesn’t seem especially giving, but that’s because she’s unstable. An average Type 2 is so busy helping others, they’re completely out of touch with their own needs and desires, but at their best, Type 2s are completely selfless, tireless, and altruistic, and will do anything for you. They’re like worker bees or drones. And they’re often attracted to powerful people, or queen bees like Big Swiss. In fact, in the Enneagram literature, a Type 2 who’s in a relationship with a Type 8 is described as “the power behind the throne.” 

I love the Enneagram. I was obsessed with it when I lived in Berkeley. Can I ask what you are? I'm a 5w4, which means I was delighted when you wanted to do this interview over email! 

Aw I like 5s. I first learned about the Enneagram when I cleaned houses in Santa Cruz in the early 90s. A lot of my clients were into it. That, and NLP and The Forum. Anyway, I remember lying my way through the test the first time (I really wanted to be a 4), but when I retook it years later and answered honestly, it turns out I’m a 2w3! which I’m okay with, I guess.

You’re like Greta! So Big Swiss made me literally LOL in a way that most books don’t. Can you talk about your approach to humor while writing a novel? 

I guess my approach is not to take myself too seriously, which sounds kind of dumb and obvious, and just to write the sort of book I most like to read, which is usually something heavy but also light on its feet, fast-paced and horny, and generally not too full of itself. Since the process of writing and publishing a novel is often so long and hellish, keeping yourself entertained is vital. 

Big Swiss is being adapted into an HBO show produced by A24 and starring Jodie Comer, which feels huge? 

I’m kind of superstitious so I’m reluctant to talk about it too much and in fact I’m touching wood as I type this, but yeah, Jodie Comer read the manuscript and brought it to HBO, A24, and Hyperobject (Adam McKay’s production company), and it’s now being adapted by Kayleigh Llewellyn, creator of the brilliant BBC series In My Skin, and it’s by far the hugest thing that’s ever happened to me. 

Your first two novels, Pretend I’m Dead and Vacuum in the Dark, star a housecleaner named Mona. What made you decide to depart from Mona and her world with Big Swiss? 

Big Swiss would have been another Mona book but I felt ready to write a character closer to my own age, and besides, Mona would have spent the entire novel cleaning that house. Also, people come to books for a certain amount of escapism, and I’m not sure they were getting enough of that from reading about Mona cleaning toilets and snooping in garbage cans, so I wanted to give them an escape into another life, this time in a gossipy upstate vacation town, and to explore a different kind of voyeurism. 

Are you working on anything new?

My first two books are connected, so for the sake of symmetry, I might write a sequel to Big Swiss, but only if it sells fifty thousand copies in the first year, hahaha.