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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.
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.
"With bracing detail, a practiced poetic consciousness, and something like foreboding mysticism, [Hood] excavates the layers of both her personal experience and what it reflects about sexualized violence against women generally and transwomen in particular...Here, the artistic intentionality of Hood's narration meets the genius of her project...A magnificent, norm-shattering work." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Brilliant...with piercing intellect and lyrical prose, Hood redraws the boundaries of the tell-all memoir. It's a rare feat of storytelling." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Hood's writing is strong, elegant, and precise...profoundly powerful and compelling...[She] is simultaneously a lyrical poet who uses language in unexpected ways and an unflinchingly honest, keen observer of base ugliness." —Booklist
"This book devastated me. I found my whole being thrumming with the energy of Hood's refusals, her intense thinking and feeling, the formal play with the modernist novel, and her clear-eyed reporting in the wake of trauma. An American Annie Ernaux, Hood writes to avenge her people—with incendiary brilliance, wit, pain, and devotion to the search for something like truth." —Kate Zambreno, author of Heroines
"Trauma Plot is an ode to the wrecked woman, the bloody battle of survivorship, and the act of writing itself—not because writing can save us, but because it reminds us we're still alive." —Melissa Lozada-Oliva, author of Dreaming of You and Candelaria
This information about Trauma Plot was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jamie Hood is the author of How to Be a Good Girl, one of Vogue's Best Books of 2020, and regards, marcel, a monthly newsletter on Proust and other miscellany. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Baffler, Bookforum, The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, The Drift, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.
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