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 A VOGUE AND VULTURE BEST
BOOK OF THE YEAR (SO FAR) "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.
