Trauma Plot
A Life
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From a rising literary star and the author of how to be a good girl comes a brilliant, biting, and beautifully wrought memoir of trauma and the cost of survival
A VULTURE NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
"Piercing . . . . Trauma Plot flips the confessional memoir on its head."—The Cut
"An innovative, rigorous, genre-bending, and ultimately life-affirming account of what it takes to survive."—Vulture
In the thick of lockdown, 2020, poet, critic, and memoirist Jamie Hood published her debut, how to be a good girl, an interrogation of modern femininity and the narratives of love, desire, and violence yoked to it. The Rumpus praised Hood’s “bold vulnerability,” and Vogue named it a Best Book of 2020.
In Trauma Plot, Hood draws on disparate literary forms to tell the story that lurked in good girl’s margins—of three decades marred by sexual violence and the wreckage left behind. With her trademark critical remove, Hood interrogates the archetype of the rape survivor, who must perform penitence long after living through the unthinkable, invoking some of art’s most infamous women to have played the role: Ovid’s Philomela, David Lynch’s Laura Palmer, and Artemisia Gentileschi, who captured Judith’s wrath. In so doing, she asks: What do we as a culture demand of survivors? And what do survivors, in turn, owe a world that has abandoned them?
Trauma Plot is a scalding work of personal and literary criticism. It is a send-up of our culture's pious disdain for “trauma porn,” a dirge for the broken promises of #MeToo, and a paean to finding life after death.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this brilliant memoir, poet and essayist Hood (How to Be a Good Girl) recounts a series of rapes she suffered in her 20s and probes the limits of narrative's ability to describe the fallout. Between 2012 and 2014, Hood was raped three times by different men—some she knew, some she did not—in Boston and Brooklyn. Drawing on journal entries and her memories to convey the terror she felt during the attacks, Hood supplements her recollections with distanced, critical assessments of her assailants. After regaining consciousness in the middle of one assault, for example, Hood accepted her rapist's offer to drive her home. She recalls his steady stream of chatter, his nonchalant grip on the steering wheel, and how she wondered later if he interpreted her decision to get in the car "as absolution." She's just as unflinching in recounting her behavior in the months following each rape, including excessive drinking, drug use, and risky sex, as she attempted to reclaim her own desires and distance herself from victimhood. In the bruising final section, Hood works with a therapist to process the violence and wrestles with how to present her story ("Why should I make my rape book artful.... shouldn't trauma be a mess?"). With piercing intellect and lyrical prose, Hood redraws the boundaries of the tell-all memoir. It's a rare feat of storytelling.
