“I write for the messy bitches,” Jamie Hood tells us in the introduction to her second book and first memoir, Trauma Plot: A Life. “I write for girls who haven’t given their grief language.” The book is a memoir in four sections addressing the sexual violence that Hood survived over the course of three decades, and the aftermath of this trauma.
Each section uses a different form and narrative point of view — third person, first person, second person, and finally first person plural — to navigate the messiness of trauma in a way that is true to the fracturing nature of the experience. “I refuse to reconcile them,” Hood writes of the book’s multiple forms and styles. “I wanted my account to wrestle with rape’s dis-ordering, how it turned my cells against themselves.”
Trauma Plot interrogates the confessional and who, in our culture, gets to be believed, whose stories are respected, what kinds of people are seen as worthy of listening to. It’s at once a clarifying look at sexual violence and an interrogation of the very concept of the so-called “trauma plot.” We spoke with Hood over Zoom about her turn to memoir, the literary traditions running through the book, and what it means to reclaim your story.
You’re a critic and a poet, and this is your first memoir. How has your experience been turning to writing a memoir?
Jamie Hood: You know, it didn’t feel like such a radical shift because my first book (How to Be a Good Girl), which is poetry, is very much cut from the same cloth as Trauma Plot. A lot of the form that existed in that book feels present here as well — I always write from my diaries, which I feel like makes us kin.
Trauma Plot features a lot of direct quotes from your diaries. How did you work with your own diaries as a source material? What was that process like?
Jamie Hood: I was scanning through the diaries and trying to assemble a continuous narrative. But as I was doing that, I got sucked in a little bit and I felt very overwhelmed by how much I had forgotten — and I think it’s quite dangerous to say that when you’re talking about a memoir you’ve written. To say, ‘I forgot a lot of the details’. And I think it’s quite dangerous to talk about a rape story where you say there are things that I forgot, because it makes you — in a world that hates to believe anyone who comes forward about violence and trauma — a potentially discredited witness of your own life, right? Seeing how much had been lost to the sands of time was a jarring experience, but it was also incredibly thrilling; imagining a dynamic relation between me and my past self felt really exciting.
Let’s talk more about the form – each section of the book is written from a different perspective. You write that you refuse to reconcile these different forms, in large part because trauma and rape is fundamentally disordering. How did you land on the book’s final form?
Jamie Hood: We want to pretend there is a true story to be told. I mean, there are things that happened — I was raped. That is indisputable. Period. But I can tell that story in a lot of different ways. And being able to do something with form where I was imagining myself in the third person enabled me to articulate how dissociated I was at the time. That process also required me to establish distance in order to forgive that past version. There’s something about allowing a world in which a memoir can be fragmentary, and the subject within it can be kaleidoscopically imagined. Being able to imagine my subjectivity as discontinuous or fragmented did allow me to look back on my own shame and to feel less distaste for it, and to feel more generous towards myself. The other thing is just that a lot of these formal maneuvers allowed me to write about the worst possible things at a kind of remove that felt emotionally necessary.
My response to my trauma was very discordant from what people demand of rape victims or survivors
You talk in a book’s introduction about the tension between the importance of telling stories about trauma and sexual violence – whether in memoir or also within #MeToo – and how there’s a limit to storytelling as a mode for making material change. How do you think about that tension, and why does sharing stories about sexual trauma still matter?
Jamie Hood: I do think that it matters, period. It’s difficult to be on a press cycle about this book in our political moment, because I feel so demoralised by it. People sort of poo-poo all over #MeToo in hindsight, and I think there are many reasons to be deeply critical of it as a movement. But I remember that initial moment feeling so incredible. And I think that the deluge of stories that happened (through #MeToo), if nothing else, proved how pervasive sexual violence is in our world. Rebecca Solnit calls the pandemic of male violence against women ‘the longest war’; she talks about how it predates all other wars. That felt like an important revelation to me when I read about it because it was like, oh right, what happened to me is not anomalous — this is everywhere.
The question of the limit to storytelling is a complicated question. I didn’t want to do a rape trial. In terms of the idea of what is justice, my version of justice was not putting men in prison. Partly I just don’t think throwing people in prison and letting them rot is the right political maneuver, and partly it’s that the way the system operates is that it destroys women who come forward about sexual violence. And I think that’s something that I would argue is a value of first-person storytelling about trauma: that we determine the parameters through which the story exists. We at least have some sort of authority. I think that storytelling is one mode of possibility for dismantling or changing things. And that is the one where I think that I have the most to offer.
I think that storytelling is one mode of possibility for dismantling or changing things. And that is the one where I think that I have the most to offer
You talk in the book about this idea of the perfect victim, and how the book itself might even be seen as a rape trial. You also talk about how all of this connects in particular to being a trans woman. How do you navigate the concept of respectability, and how did you arrive at this unapologetic space of claiming your story?
Jamie Hood: I think honestly, a lot of it was just therapy. The stuff that happens in the final chapter, the therapy chapter, feels like the rawest part of the book to me. In a different world where I wanted to come off as more respectable, I would not have published that chapter. My response to my trauma was very discordant from what people demand of rape victims or survivors. I was violated repeatedly over multiple decades, and my response to that was to treat my body as if it was the exact amount of nothing that men had treated it as. I partied a lot, I drank a lot, I did a fuck-ton of drugs. I fucked so many guys — like so many guys. And that makes me truly the worst possible victim. Like if you watch an episode of SVU, that’s the bitch who’s gonna get decimated on the stand, and I always knew that.
Maybe this is too intimate or something, but I really thought that I deserved what happened. I had incorporated so much of the logic of rape culture; I had bought into it wholesale. And it’s funny because I never thought that about other people; it was a kind of hatred that I reserved solely for myself. Looking at that in the face in therapy and coming to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter if I was a mess — like, it doesn’t matter if I was treating myself poorly, I still didn’t deserve to be raped by those men.
In the book you also talk directly about how creating art or media about trauma is often seen in our culture as something people do to make a buck or sell their story. How did you navigate that tension around the disavowed first-person trauma narrative while you were writing this book?
Jamie Hood: I think I had to just be like, I’m not gonna navigate that. Like if these people fucking hate me and think I’m stupid they’re gonna hate me and think I’m stupid no matter what. It’s kind of like the perfect victim thing. It’s like, am I the perfect female confessionalist or not?
I think it was important to position myself in relation to the discourse [around trauma plots] in part because the discourse is one of the reasons why I decided to publish this book. The thing that made me pick it up again as a project was seeing the backlash and literary criticism against trauma plots. We can trace it to that The New Yorker article, or you can trace it to Twitter, where you see people talking about women who write for The Cut like they’re fucking morons, you know? I don’t think confessional literature or first-person women’s art is above critique, but I do think that an overarching dismissal of it felt very familiar to me from my work in grad school on confessional art, and the work of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and thinking about women’s art from life and the historical dismissals of that work.
