Post-traumatic
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- € 1,49
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In this story on survival, a young lawyer’s family reunion brings long-buried pain and anger to the surface, threatening her career, her values, and all of her relationships—a story of trauma, healing, and the power of ride-or-die female friendship.
To the outside observer, Vivian is a success story—a dedicated lawyer who advocates for mentally ill patients at a New York City psychiatric hospital. Privately, Vivian contends with the memories and aftereffects of her bad childhood—compounded by the everyday stresses of being a Black Latinx woman in America. She lives in a constant state of hypervigilant awareness that makes even a simple subway ride into a heart-pounding drama.
For years, Vivian has self-medicated with a mix of dating, dieting, dark humor and smoking weed with her BFF, Jane. But after a family reunion prompts Vivian to take a bold step, she finds herself alone in new and terrifying ways, without even Jane to confide in, and she starts to unravel. Will she find a way to repair what matters most to her?
A debut from a stunning talent, Post-traumatic is a new kind of survivor narrative, featuring a complex heroine who is blazingly, indelibly alive. With razor-sharp prose and mordant wit, Chantal V. Johnson performs an extraordinary feat, delivering a psychologically astute story about the aftermath of trauma that somehow manages to brim with warmth, laughter, and hope.
“Deeply original.” —Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and Either/Or
“Violently funny.” —Myriam Gurba, author of Mean
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Johnson explores in her brutally funny and poignant debut a Black Latinx woman's childhood trauma and daily struggles. Vivian is a 30-something state-appointed attorney in a public psychiatric hospital, advocating for the rights of patients. Among the cases she's working on is Melissa's, a teenager recently transferred to the adult unit who pulls a knife on hospital staff. Vivian spends her free time smoking weed with her best friend, Jane, in an effort to cope with the painful elements of her life outside work, such as phone calls with her drunk older brother, Michael, who dances around the sexual abuse inflicted upon them as children by their mother's boyfriends. She also nurses an eating disorder and goes on many fruitless dates in search of the perfect man. Dark humor is another coping mechanism for Vivian, which Johnson deploys with tremendous skill, as Vivian's only-between-friends joke about Brown University being a "great place to go if you were abused" leads to she and Jane reflecting on their feelings about the younger generation's embrace of "lefty-politics stuff," which they wish had been around when they were coming up. After a tense reunion with Michael and their Puerto Rican mother, Vivian starts to unravel as she considers cutting herself off from her family. The pressures build as she botches Melissa's case, gets dumped, and has a big fight with Jane. Throughout, Vivian's confrontational interactions feel achingly true to life. This is revelatory and powerful.
