Rebecca Coffey is an award-winning print journalist, documentary filmmaker, and radio commentator. Coffey contributes regularly to Scientific American and Discover magazines. Her most recent major work is the March 2012 eBook MURDERS MOST FOUL: And the School Shooters in Our Midst. Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Rumpus, and a large handful of literary magazines and e-zine

There are several serviceable biographies about child psychoanalyst Anna Freud, who lived from 1895 to 1982. But as a fictional memoir, Hysterical is the first novel to reveal Anna’s secrets—and two are blockbusters: 1) At around the time that the young Anna began having intense “friendships” with other women, her father Sigmund began psychoanalyzing her—dissecting her dreams, memories, and, most disturbingly, her sexual fantasies, and writing about them; 2) While Anna publicly supported her father’s “wisdom” about lesbianism and remained his favorite family member, she enjoyed a monogamous relationship with Tiffany fortune heiress Dorothy Burlingham for fifty-four years. Weaving a good story out of a pile of crazy facts, Hysterical lets Anna freely examine the forces that shaped her.