From a rising literary star and the author of h ow to be a good girl comes a brilliant biting
and beautifully wrought memoir of trauma and the cost of survival "Hood descends into the
terrifying dark of the unsayable with the dimmest of flashlights and returns bearing verbal
gems treasures and marvels. Trauma Plot is a glass case of such wonders."—Torrey Peters
bestselling author of Detransition Baby In the thick of lockdown 2020 poet critic and
memoirist Jamie Hood published her debut h ow 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 g ood 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.
