Her Body Knows (Hebrew: Guf Yode’a) was published by Hakibbutz Hameuchad in 2002. The English translation by Jessica Cohen appeared from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2005. The book contains two novellas: “Frenzy” and “Her Body Knows,” both centered on women in states of emotional and physical extremity.
“Frenzy” follows a woman who leaves her husband and drives through Israel in a state of escalating intensity, picking up a hitchhiking soldier and entering into a brief, charged encounter that becomes a meditation on desire, power, aging, and the gap between the self one presents to the world and the self that emerges under pressure.
“Her Body Knows” traces a woman’s physical and emotional response to a hysterectomy — the loss of reproductive capacity and its meaning for identity, desire, and the body’s relationship to time. The writing is extraordinarily visceral: Grossman renders physical sensation with an immediacy that borders on the unbearable, making the reader feel the body’s knowledge in a way that transcends intellectual understanding.
Both novellas demonstrate Grossman’s capacity to write convincingly from within female consciousness — a capacity that has drawn both praise (for its empathetic depth) and skepticism (from readers who question whether any male author can truly inhabit female interiority). Grossman’s achievement is not authenticity in any simple sense but imaginative commitment: he enters these experiences with the same intensity he brings to all his work.
Collecting Her Body Knows
First edition English (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2005): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First English edition, fine/fine: $15–$30
- Very good/very good: $5–$15