Jessica Gross’s sophomore novel, Open Wide, centers Olive, a mid-30s, New York City radio host and interviewer longing for emotional intimacy. In her spare time, she walks around the city with a recording device, sometimes picking up the everyday sounds of forks clinking or footsteps receding, other times recording personal conversations unbeknownst to the other parties involved. Alone, she analyzes these recordings, attempting to understand people as a whole through conversation patterns and social norms. This compulsion serves her well in on-air conversations with writers, but even this one-on-one format disturbs Olive. She recognizes power imbalances inherent to the art of interviewing that have the potential to stymie organic conversation and prohibit people from ever truly knowing one another.
Everything changes when Olive meets Theo, a dreamy bachelor with strange impulses of his own, and falls into the kind of love that verges on obsession. When privately recording their conversations still leaves her yearning for a truer intimacy, she notes a gap in Theo’s teeth just wide enough for someone to slip through. So she does. What happens next is surreal—there’s no way around that—but is also a moving, sometimes unnerving, articulation of a deeply human desire: to know someone so completely that you feel you become one with them.
Sharply psychological, vivid, and compulsively readable, Gross explores the ways that consent, obsession, art, intimacy, intrusion, and perception intersect with the idea of love. How much of any relationship is knowing another versus being known? Can anyone ever really know someone else’s truest, realest self? Or are art, conversations, and love inevitably failed attempts at communicating our inner worlds?
I had the opportunity to speak with Jessica Gross over Zoom about the complexities of intimacy, parents, privacy, and what happens when human impulses are taken to surreal places.
Jacqueline Alnes: The question I had after reading this book is obviously: Can we ever really know anybody?
Jessica Gross: What do you think?
JA: See, this interview is so meta. In the novel, Olive interviews writers and thinks about the power dynamics in terms of who gets to ask the questions and who shapes the final product.
There is something scary about being extreme on the page.
My answer, though, is no. This novel gets at the desire that all of us likely share on some level, which is to feel safe in relationships through something measurable. We want to feel like relationships are stable, but relationships are always capable of fracture and people are always changing. Your book seems to be asking: What do you do with that?
JG: Yes. And, can we ever really know ourselves? People spend decades trying to study themselves in therapy. I think we can make headway. I’ve been trying really hard for a long time to know myself, and I am me, so if I’m still a mystery to me, how could I possibly know another person better than that?
But then, do we need to understand people completely to love them? What counts as knowing? That’s an epistemological question. If we know our most intimate people 50-70%, is that enough? Not for Olive, obviously, but maybe for us?
JA: Olive takes closeness to the extreme—she literally crawls inside of her boyfriend—but there is so much truth within the book’s surreal elements. The novel makes me think about how complicated intimacy can be. You want to be close to someone, but being too close can feel like an intrusion. What about this tension inherent to intimacy interests you?
JG: It’s something I’ve struggled with personally. In Hysteria, my first book, my narrator is very promiscuous. She has issues with intimacy but she doesn’t have issues with making herself vulnerable. I’m more like Olive, where I would crush very hard from afar, but be nervous to take the risk of making myself vulnerable to somebody or to rejection. It’s something I took from my personal life and then amplified and fictionalized. I have my own tensions between wanting to be close to someone in a romantic way and also being very afraid of what that means giving up, control-wise or safety-wise.
JA: Is there a truth that you took back to your real life from exploring this in a surreal way?
JG: It takes a long time to write a book. From 2019, when I started the book, to 2025, which it is now, I went from being single, living in New York, to being married, with a child, in West Texas. That’s a huge amount of change. I do feel like exploring my own boundary issues through this fictional lens helped me process certain things, but it didn’t magically make me stop having issues. I still think about giving proper amounts of space to other people, whether it’s to my husband, my daughter, or myself. Giving space isn’t something I was properly taught growing up, so I’m continually trying to figure it out. How much space do I need? How much space do other people need? What does that look like in intimate relationships?
JA: I love how, in the novel, you articulate the idea of how other people’s relationships are so private that it’s often difficult to know if the relationship you are in is “normal” or not. What we encounter shapes who we are and it’s really difficult as an adult to suddenly learn new things.
JG: Totally. Intellectual learning is the very first step and then how do you actually change your innermost tendencies? It’s so hard.
JA: So much of the book is about control. Even Olive’s methods for knowing other people, like secretly recording them, allow her access without alerting anyone. In some ways, that closeness is not real because it only happens for one person instead of two people.
JG: It’s so interesting you pointed that out. That’s an aspect that’s more fictional. What she does is pernicious. It’s not very fair. She definitely has a double-standard. Olive wants to pull the strings.
I had a close friend, years ago—we lived in New York together—and I was rather dependent on her. At one point, she was going on vacation, and I was like no, please don’t go. And she was like, “Oh, I’ll be back on this date,” and I told her I’d be on vacation at that time. She was like, you can go on vacation, but I can’t? Control, what can I say.
JA: I can’t tell if this is just my experience or if it’s something about this era or where I am in terms of age—I feel like there isn’t as much casual intimacy in my life as there once was. I’m thinking about college. I lived with people and we had a daily repertoire, touch and inside jokes. I have very good friends now, but that specific closeness is gone. We have intimacy online, but that’s a different way of being with and seeing other people.
JG: A combination of growing up, becoming an adult, and doing all of it in this particular era is insanely depressing to me. I love being close to people—I think about college, too. Even my childhood friends. There was a level of physical intimacy that’s not really possible to replicate with people you meet when you’re like 37 years old. Maybe it is for some people, but I haven’t found it.
The whole social media thing, what can I say about it that hasn’t been said? I have a nineteen month old daughter and I feel so sad that she will have to contend with these things. I didn’t have social media at all until college and that was such a blessing, I cannot tell you how fortunate I feel. I want to simulate it for her, but we can’t. Everyone she knows is going to have this. Either she’s going to be on it and damaged by it or off it and disconnected from the social scene that she will be thrust into. It feels like a lose-lose situation. I’m sure someone with a less binary mindset can come up with something better by the time she’s going to use it. It’s sad. It feels like a lot has been lost in terms of capacities for intimacy.
The one thing I will say about living in a smaller town is that, compared to New York, I see people with a lot more regularity. It’s a smaller community, people are more available. That is a kind of intimacy I’ve discovered in more recent years.
JA: I think that’s why readers will relate to Olive. I didn’t agree with her methods, but I understood her impulses and her want for closeness.
JG: I think the seed of her struggle is deeply human.
JA: What did the surreal element in this novel allow you to explore?
JG: It let me grapple with the problem or question with a little more distance. It’s like looking at an object from a bit further away instead of being inside it. The absurdity—it’s funny. It makes me laugh. And on the other hand, I think it’s philosophically interesting. Okay, you want to be one with someone? What does that look like? It forces a deep interrogation.
Emily Temple at Literary Hub wrote that this book is “pushing things to their logical conclusion and then pushing them a little further than that.” That’s what I want to do, and that’s what I have good readers to push me to do. I kept writing up to the point where she opens up his body and I kept getting scared, going back, and revising, over and over. Finally, I sent it to my agent and told her I thought I should scrap it and make it a realist novel. She was like no, keep going. She held my feet to the fire. It was really helpful. There is something scary about being so extreme on the page.
JA: In both your books, there are parental issues around closeness, rejection, and desire. There are boundaried and un-boundaried relationships. What draws you to writing about these parental figures?
JG: I joke that Hysteria is my daddy-issues book and Open Wide is my mommy-issues book. I don’t know what the third book will be? Now I’m a mommy book, maybe?
I’m very interested in psychoanalysis and interested in the way people are shaped. I think that our families of origin shape us in incredibly potent ways. Now, as a mother, I feel it as an enormous responsibility because I know how impactful the relationship is forever and how things that can feel minor to a parent are felt very strongly by children, depending on their temperament. It’s something that I’m intellectually and personally interested in. How we are formed, what factors go into making us who we are?
JA: I was thinking about how people say, “My heart is outside my body” when they have a kid. It’s obviously a figure of speech—I say this as someone who is not a parent—but your kids are of you and also their own selves. It seems like this terrible reckoning you have to have every moment, in that you are responsible for them and you are responsible, in part, for what experiences they have in the world, but at the same time, they are of themselves. How do you negotiate that line?
We are compulsively unable to help ourselves from making the kinds of mistakes our parents made.
JG: It’s wild. Even just the minutiae of responding throughout the day. My daughter isn’t a baby, she’s not in the tablet era yet, she’s a toddler. She is going through an interesting phase where she is negotiating her attachment and separation from me. I feel incredibly aware of wanting to handle it well, in a way that shows her I’m here, but that I don’t cling, but then I don’t want to push her toward independence too fast. It’s really delicate and very minute-to-minute. There are one billion moments every single day. I don’t have to do every moment perfectly, but the majority I need to do a good enough job that she feels stable, held, and also confident exploring. It’s really hard.
JA: Olive and her mom highlight the guilt that can come up when you are a child trying to establish independence, especially when it’s not given to you in a way that feels good. It’s a difficult negotiation to say, “I love you and I hope you know that—and I need privacy in order to be a person.”
JG: When I started writing, I was only aware of the child’s perspective because I had only been a child. I knew I needed respect for my independence. Now, as a parent, I understand how it’s hard. I struggled more than anticipated with my daughter’s own burgeoning independence and will. There is something really sweet about having a baby and being really close. There is loss involved in them growing up and I’m already feeling it. I get it from the parent’s perspective now.
JA: I think Olive starts to identify her own need for boundaries by reflecting on moments when hers have been broken in significant ways by her mom. What did you learn from exploring boundaries or boundary-making?
JG: What’s interesting about Olive’s situation, which I think is true for so many people, is that we can struggle with things our parents did—even be completely aware of what they did that we don’t like—and still find ourselves replicating it. It is so deeply unfortunate that humans are built to do this neurotic repetition thing. We are compulsively unable to help ourselves from making the kinds of mistakes our parents made.
JA: Your novels are both psychological in nature and it strikes me that writing itself seems to allow for an opening up of a character, or an exploration of the hidden parts of humans. Do you feel like writing does allow that deep probing, or is it just another illusion of closeness?
JG: I do think it’s a way of probing, but it’s not like writing is therapy. It’s almost like an interesting way to play around with or reapply insights gleaned from introspection, for example, from therapy. I think it often lets me look at something from a different angle or in a different way or even just again. It’s interesting and often necessary for me to look at something again and again and again to feel like I’ve gotten it. I think writing can be revealing, but in concert with other things.
What do you think?
JA: I was struck by the idea that sometimes writing can feel like what Olive does with her voice recorder, it gives you the sense that you’ve contained the world in a scene or in words that help you understand or navigate it. That’s the beauty of writing.
When I read this novel, I got to sit with some of your thoughts and apply them to my own set of similar questions—it creates this opening for us to encounter parts of ourselves that we otherwise might never encounter. I also thought about the way you write about art as an artifact separate from our true, inner selves. It’s this interesting way that what we create becomes something that is both real and artifice at the same time.
JG: I don’t know that I have a neat answer to it. In a way, this is so many performances of introspection and discovery.
JA: But then it’s also real, in a way. I wouldn’t say that this wasn’t real.
JG: Right.
JA: I crafted these questions, arranged them, asked them, and—like you wrote in the novel—the subject of an interview often knows that the audience is much wider than just the listener on the other end of the line. That changes our answers.
JG: It comes full circle in thinking about how we started the conversation, about knowing people. What does it mean to know someone?
