In flashbacks, the younger Lilly is fascinated by her mother's work and some books on alchemy, but their relationship is fraught. Helen is a master bookbinder who works in the basement of their suburban home repairing old books sent from Israel. Helen was raised in Old Jerusalem and educated in London, eventually immigrating to the United States, where she married Lilly's father, David Weill, an entertainment lawyer in New York City. We learn that Lilly is a student at Sarah Lawrence College trying to make her way toward emotional independence from her domineering and very complex mother, Helen, who, it soon becomes clear, has her own burdens.
How she got there, literally and figuratively, is revealed through Skolkin-Smith's effective use of flashbacks. Hystera follows Lilly's journey through madness, from her initial examination at the hospital to her stay in a New York City psychiatric hospital to her eventual discharge. It is a short but powerful depiction of a young woman's emotional breakdown following the accidental death of her father, for which she blames herself. Leora Skolkin-Smith's Hystera is one of those books. It also pungently evokes the gritty New York of the ’70s.It's no secret that the publishing world is so crowded with books that outstanding, even important, books sometimes get lost in that crowd. “Leora Skolkin-Smith’s new novel, Hystera, provides a very vivid sense of being in the head of someone having a psychotic breakdown, and is a powerfully useful reference book for dealing with the mental-health system. Brilliantly envisioned, this story of passion, and familial dysfunction, bears witness to an exquisite reknitting of a young woman’s soul, told in language that is brave, startling and ultimately tender and wise.”- Jessica Keener, author of Night Swim “Inside a psychiatric ward in the 1970s, Leora Skolkin-Smith’s Hystera takes you on a ride through the wilderness of a young woman’s emotional trauma and breakdown, and seizes upon the intricacies of mental health, our phobias, and fears around it. Skolkin-Smith’s alchemy is to inhabit her characters even as she crafts a riveting story that is nothing short of brilliant.”- Caroline Leavitt bestselling author of Pictures of You “Hystera is a haunting, mesmerizing story of madness, longing and identity, set against one of the most fascinating times in NYC history. An eye-opening novel."- Joan Silber, author of Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories, finalist for the National Book Award “In language with the wild power of accuracy, Hystera maps a path through the landscape of trauma and illness, the feverish news of the seventies, and a character’s own indelibly vivid imagery of alarm and comfort.
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