Strange, Unforgettable Women

Sam Franzini climbs into Jessica Gross’s “Open Wide.”

By Sam FranziniAugust 26, 2025

• Fiction

“I DO NOT WISH to explain my passion—that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify,” Annie Ernaux writes in Simple Passion (1991). “I just want to describe it.”

Passion is the backbone of Open Wide (2025), Jessica Gross’s wickedly liberating and queasily sexual fantasy of a novel. When Olive, a Jewish radio podcaster, meets a surgeon named Theo while volunteering at a food bank, she’s enamored not with the glint in his eye but with the hollow in the back of his knee and the gap between two of his bottom teeth. Her desire is guttural, bodily, and it sets the novel up for the rampage of misdemeanors and indulgent acts to come; when he probes his teeth with his tongue, she “wonder[s]—already, in that moment—what that gap would feel like against [her] finger, [her] lips, [her] own tongue.” That’s page 15.

You can walk into any Barnes & Noble and search for the candy-colored covers under the “BookTok” section to find a steamy romance, but Open Wide goes further than any of them. I was positively charmed by Theo; he had me feeling coy, like how I imagine Emily Henry’s novels make hearts palpitate. He’s game for more of Olive’s sexual fetishes and neuroses than he should be, and with little to no family trauma to boot. He is only sappy sometimes, as when he egregiously describes her soul as a “long conversation,” an “infinite strand of DNA.” And his relaying of bloody operation-table butcherings ignites Olive; she can hardly believe someone has matched her brash, often violent passions. Unfortunately, they’re made for each other.

Ilya Repin’s 1884 portrait of Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin on the book’s cover is not Theo, but it might as well be—Olive develops a crush on the long-dead Russian writer after seeing his portrait at the Met (and she crushes deep). Garshin was a writer saddened by war, stricken with empathy—his buddy Anton Chekhov, in a short story, cast him as a humanitarian who “could reflect in his soul the sufferings of others.” Despite her lust, Olive avoids learning more about Garshin: “No matter what I found out, it wouldn’t live up to my fantasies,” she tells Theo. His and Garshin’s images intertwine, making Olive’s eventual transgressions all the more disturbing when you have doey, pleading eyes wooing you on the cover. That’s my parasocial boyfriend, too!

As they get serious, Olive combines her professional and personal lives by recording snippets of conversation with a tape she got in her childhood as a Hanukkah gift. The transcripts comfort her, Theo’s presence a relief when he’s away (annoyingly, surgeons must be on call a lot). Though her sisters are reasonably irked by Olive recording them, a childhood quirk they thought she grew out of, it doesn’t dissuade her—she even records sex with Theo to masturbate to (an auditory spank bank, if you will). She gets more desperate, and by the time she unzips Theo by pulling apart his front teeth and nestling inside his body for the night, it’s only slightly less realistic than Gross’s 2020 novel Hysteria, in which an unnamed narrator sleeps with a bartender whom she has hallucinated to be Sigmund Freud.

I should back up a bit. Open Wide, though, does make its motives clear from the start—Olive wants to get inside this dude. Gross drops clues, verging on dead giveaways, about Olive’s obsession with Theo’s body, the title foremost. He’s smart and funny, sure, but she really wants to “wedge [her]self between his organs, curling [her]self around the hot pile of his intestine and clutching it to [her].” This might reside in a lesser novel as a throwaway image, but here, Olive is serious. Gross writes:

I tried picturing really being one with Theo, figuring that it might allow me to get it out of my system in fantasy. I could build a private, perfect world of union, one I could return to whenever I liked. I imagined melting Theo’s and my bodies over an open flame until we were liquid, the pools of us swirling together to create one small pond. In the winter we froze over; in the spring we melted; in the summer, heat shimmered above us; when Theo thought a thought, it was my thought, too. […] I wanted to be inside him, to be held, subsumed, almost crushed, with total access and yet inaccessible.

Olive transforms this theory into practice. One night, while Theo is sleeping, she jams her pointer fingers between his gapped teeth and pulls. “[W]ith a sound like tape being ripped from a cardboard box,” she opens Theo “down his chin and neck and chest, all the way to his groin.” Like a child knowing they’ve gone too far, she undoes her tracks, only for the next night to take it further and step inside of him, sleeping with his oily insides. But when she wakes up and comes out, covered in slime, he’s awake, staring at her, thankfully still murky from sleep (“I had a strange dream, I think it was Thanksgiving, or something about eating a big meal”). With Olive’s disturbing fantasies now fulfilled, the relationship has transcended.

Gross’s strength lies in leaning in; she understands that sex is murky and messy, strange and shameful. Olive develops a language: she calls her excursions of spending the night inside Theo “climbs”; she lowers herself into the “pool” of his body. She limits herself to one climb per night, on Fridays, “to maximize [her] gratification” like an alcoholic pacing out their beers. “It also felt fitting to climb on a night that was holy to me and my people, but not to Theo and his,” she mentions. Her delusions are entertaining, with the sickly twist of being somewhat agreeable—“Didn’t pregnant people feel special, anointed, as though they could be holding the messiah?” she wonders.

It’s refreshing how easily the novel marries sex and disgust. Far too many erotic scenes sanitize the truth—people are disgusting!—to uphold the fantasy of clean, perfect tension. Gross knows it’s a facade. Olive offhandedly mentions letting Felix, her dog, lick the cum off her vibrator—“in a way, he had been between my legs, by proxy—like kissing a tallit to touch the Torah,” likely something no one has verbalized before. To test whether she can record inside Theo, she shoves a microphone up her asshole, “doing a Kegel exercise of sorts,” then walking around the block to see its reach. It was painful, but “as you might imagine, it was also arousing.”

Open Wide dances around the F-word—fetish—and frames the couple simply as two people whose relationship is a little twisted, as if Olive’s lust for the cavern of Theo’s body has the same weight as an innocuous kink. When Theo finds out that Olive has been recording their intercourse, he storms out, only to come back and ask, “Is it hot?” (They fuck to the audio.) He obviously doesn’t believe her when she says she climbs inside him during the night; he gets a boner when she demonstrates (“My body betrays me”). She records him releasing a guttural moan during a climb, the same as when he ejaculates. After she comes out, he licks the slime of her body off her skin. He permits her weekly climbs but only if she records inside of him and sends him the audio. “I wondered now if life, like art, was built in threes,” Olive thinks; “there was Theo, there was me, and there was the recorder.” In the words of Tinashe’s 2024 hit “Nasty,” Theo and Olive match each other’s freak. It’s thrilling when you forget, over time, how squeamish the whole thing is.

In an effort to lock down the promise of more climbs, Olive sneakily tries to get Theo to admit he likes them—he came, after all—but he puts his foot down until he finds out how to get inside her, which special body part opens up the portal. She’s not allowed to open him up until he achieves it, an itch she’s desperately set on scratching (she considers opening Felix up). Theo promises he’s thinking about it, and the search takes him a while, despite an intense anal episode. “If he never did it, how could I go on believing that he really loved me?” she asks after a supposedly romantic vacation when he again remained in his body.

Soon, Olive and Theo start to push up against the boundaries of magical realism, unsure if the climbs have unintended effects or if this is all just a terrible dream. “[M]aybe it’s just the latest act. In our surreal play,” Theo says. Every couple is different, but whoa, this is really different. Olive starts to realize that her “desires,” let’s say, might be genetic. She is suddenly afflicted with visions of her Jewish-mother-to-end-all-Jewish-mothers standing over her during the night, wearing her underwear and lying about it, and developing an uncomfortable clinginess, the signs of obsession Olive recognizes in her relationship with Theo. Come to think of it, hasn’t she woken up with her mother at her bedside, Theo even catching her once? You both always had a special relationship, her older sisters remind her. How special? Olive worries.

Just as Olive figures out—or misremembers—her mother’s secrets, the latter encroaches further into her life—Cecilia, Olive’s mother, has just gotta meet this new mystery man, so she books a surprise trip to New York and is dejected when Olive won’t let her stay with her (“I didn’t realize you slept together every single night,” she says). Cecilia intrudes on plans, intrudes on Theo in the bathroom, develops inside jokes with him that seem designed to piss Olive off. In a way, Theo’s ease and assuredness reflect Olive’s lack throughout her life. “Maybe he could accept me in a way that even my own family couldn’t,” she reasons. “Wasn’t that what romance was about? You couldn’t choose your family, but you could choose your partner.” Better still to choose one that allows you to cut them open.

Thank god for Jessica Gross and her strange, unforgettable women. Open Wide is as disgusting as it is sexy, as nauseating as it is arousing. With a few less guardrails, the pitfalls of love Olive falls into with Theo might be more common. Perhaps theirs is the only truly special relationship, or Olive might genuinely be cursed by her lineage. “Does love always feel this good-bad?” a friend asks her over pasta soon after she meets Theo. Olive responds: “Always and unavoidably.”