Hood, Jamie
9780593686089, 059368608X
Trade Paperback
 
A VOGUE AND VULTURE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (SO FAR) • 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

"An innovative, rigorous, genre-bending, and ultimately life-affirming account of what it takes to survive."—Vulture

In Trauma Plot, celebrated critic and essayist Jamie Hood draws on disparate literary forms to tell the story 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. She invokes some of art’s most infamous women to have played the role: Ovid’s Philomela, David Lynch’s Laura Palmer, and Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith’s. 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.