Investigating trauma
Jamie Hood discusses "The Trauma Plot"
There’s no easy way to talk about Jamie Hood’s memoir “The Trauma Plot.” Well, that’s not true. I’m sure someone more qualified than me can. And yet, here I, a cis-white-man, am doing it.
I would not have been assigned to review or write about Hood’s unflinching and experimental memoir. At the same time, I am the kind of person who should read Hood’s examination of her trauma. I am the reader who needs to sit with her work, who needs to read about the series of rapes, sexual assaults and the resulting physical and emotional scars.
Hood writes about her rapes not from the typical memoir point of view. Instead of going for the shock and awe, she engages with her story through critical and a novelistic lens. Instead of trying to create a sensational story, Hood attempts to understand her history of rape as an intellectual problem, a puzzle, that informs trauma as a narrative tool. Her avoidance to the typical trauma memoir cliches is admirable and makes the journey through the despair and depths of darkness worth the time.
Hood opens the book with an introduction where she writes about the various essays and cultural ideologies that converge around trauma and rape. The first sentence tells the reader that she began writing in “2016, a year after five men gang-raped me and around the time the Access Hollywood tapes were leaked to the public.” A bombshell of a first sentence (and one this reader would partially forget as I immersed myself in Hood’s shifting styles and language). But those tapes of our future two-time President talking about his treatment of women, gave Hood clarity. “The Access Hollywood footage , and the reactions to it, laid bare a dynamic I’d long suspected but never confirmed: that most of the women in my life were at war, and the mean around us — even or especially the ones we loved — couldn’t see it, didn’t want to, or worse, cared hardly at all.” It’s a damning sentence and one that shows Hood’s ability to distill not only her own feelings but also the culture at-large.
And, yes, she acknowledges Parul Sehgal’s 2021 New Yorker essay “The Case Against The Trauma Plot”. Taking aim at Seghal (and other critics, writers, artists, just plain people) view writing about trauma as a “hack, just bloodletting on the helpless virginal page. It damns trauma as only ever individual, and functionally apolitical, even when texts position trauma as inextricable from systemic injustice.” Hood is aware from the outset how people will view her memoir and her ability to dissuade a reader from feeling like their going down the same path again is her superpower. She sees how the arugument about exploiting trauma for celebrity and money comes into play, and then bashes it back because she sees how critics (and other book lovers) begin to “read paranoid.” It’s a fair argument, and one I agree with as a reader. I am paranoid and wonder about the business side too damn much. I have been known to avoid sitting in the text and letting it breathe its own life. Pretension is a terrible drug.
While the introduction displays Hood’s ability to navigate an essay and an argument, which can also been seen in her other writing for places like The Drift and The Baffler, it’s her ability to tell a story in multiple phases that stands out.
“The Trauma Plot” is sectioned into four different versions of a memoir. None of it can fit in any one style or box. She has the third-person first part that features Jamie Hood, a character preparing for a party while a specter haunts her. Then there’s the second section, which follows a more traditional first person memoir style and grapples with the events of a horrific rape (and the Boston Marathon bombing, and violence, and our unforgiving nature). Then there’s the diary entries and finally a section of the book that flows out of therapy and reads more like “The Mezzanine,” with each chapter growing into meditations on the nature of trauma and its lingering effects.
What comes out of Hood’s writing is a clearer sense of what
“The Trauma Plot” is Hood’s second book. She is the author of “how to be a good girl”. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
My first question is about how you decided on the style and the different voices that you pull out here, the narrative voices. You start out talking about Jamie in the third person, and then there's the “I” and first person, and then the second person “we”, and we return to “I” again. You're really using those styles to your advantage. What unlocked that for you? What led you to do that?
You know, sometimes there's a mysteriousness to writing. I mean, it's funny, I think the answer that I have for this question tends to be that I tried a lot of different forms over the last decade and they kept feeling insufficient.
Basically, when I sold the book, in 2022. I sold it and it was much more expansive. It was in nine parts: three parts were memoir, three parts were poetry, and three parts were criticism. I ended up sort of shearing it down because I had this revelation that I was making this really labyrinthine apparatus for the book as a way of avoiding what had happened to me. Once I was in the thick of it, I had been working on the second chapter on and off for a little while -- that was the one that I think was the most fully formed when I sold the book -- and it sort of came out of a period where I thought I was going to write it as a much more conventional memoir: first person, this is me, I'm a continuous self. And I played around a little bit, I think of that chapter as where I get to sort of try on my true crime hat a little bit, or crime reporting, not really true crime, like Janet Malcolm-y.
It almost feels more like Maggie Nelson's "The Red Parts," I'm looking at it through my perspective, but I'm trying to uncover what happened instead of just reporting. Malcolm, she would be there, but she's like, I am going to give you facts the best I know.
For sure. Maggie Nelson is a great comparison point.
Then, the first chapter was the other one that I sort of was working on in tandem with the second chapter and I would turn to it whenever I felt a little overwhelmed by the second chapter. When I was writing about the rape in the second chapter, there was only so many hours a day I could do that. So I turned to the first chapter.
The first chapter was originally in the first person and it just came off so cheesy and it really wasn't working and it was like, well what if I what if I write about myself as a character? What if that allows me to feel less, I don't know, less vulnerable in this moment? If it doesn't work, it doesn't work and I'll just rewrite it again. But once I started writing about myself in the third person, it actually felt very illuminating because I think it helped unlock my capacity to feel protected in the writing process, but it also felt like a way of enabling me to play around and not be so beholden.
A memoir is subjective. It's not a biography. It is not necessary a history report. A memoir is a storytelling mode and it's how we sort of collect our lives into a narrative. So once I felt like I had a little more free reign when I was playing around in the third person, the chapter immediately made sense to me. And I was like, this is an homage to “Mrs. Dalloway.” This is a meditation on dissociation. This is a way for me to fool around, formally speaking, before I jump into the really shitty stuff. After that, the book kind of fell into place.
The fourth chapter is the one that I didn't think was going to happen in the way that it happened. The third chapter I knew I would incorporate my diaries at some point in the book and I kind of incorporate them in the second chapter too, but I didn't think I was going to want to be as raw as I was in the fourth chapter, and to be as close to that and to incorporate therapy. But it just felt like it was the work that I was doing in tandem with the work I was doing in the book. It just made sense.
I think that's my favorite section because I get a secondary voice that's not really a voice. Your therapist is there and she's asking the questions that I'm asking, and the way the time runs out is exactly how therapy works, which leads you to question everything you've ever said. I think you're allowed to kind of express the other things you're doing right like the reading you're done before starts I feel kind of alive. I think it helped contextualize, but were you worried if you did that the whole way through that it wouldn't work?
There was a world in which I had a sort of overarching narrative eye who would come in between the chapters and be like, "hello reader, now we're going to go into…Now I'm going to shift into this perspective." And I was like, I don't think people are stupid. I actually think people can follow that perfectly fine.
I think maybe I got a little bit in my head because when the book was on submission, there was an editor who really toyed with me and my agent, and he said I was “to cerebral.” I think I kind of let that critique hang over me in the way that I was processing how I wanted to do the form and thinking about, well, am I speaking from a place of condescension? Am I like being too elaborate? Am I being too weird? Do I need to handhold for certain things? I think I can just trust my readers.
I guess there's a world in which the therapy would have been sort of interspersed between the other chapters, but I think it would have ended up sort of playing the same function, where I was trying to force the experience of reading too much.
Books that force you to their viewpoint, here is how you have to think, as opposed to letting it breathe on the page, they're easier to read, so maybe they sell more copies, but I also find they're the ones that sit on people's nightstands longer. They sit there and never get finished because I'm bored. They're not leading me to a place. When I finish reading a section, I don’t go, Oh, what does that mean? I'm not taking notes in those books. I'm taking notes in your book. I wonder if that person saying you're too cerebral is getting in your head actually helped push you. It may have been annoying, but I think it helps sometimes when someone annoys you.
So I was thinking about was the diaries, and I am wondering when you started to start keep a diary. I know so many people that are like I'm going to do this and then we quit, and I include myself in that.
I've been keeping diaries since I was a kid and I've been writing since I was a kid. With the diaries, I think, probably middle school was when it became like a serious occupation for me and I come in and out.
For example, right now I feel like I'm not in a particularly intensive diary keeping moment in my life and partly that's because I have therapy and I feel like a lot of the stuff that I would put in my diary kind of has become filtered through the therapeutic process process, and partly because I have a group chat that I'm in where we just sort of talk all day long — we talk like all fucking day over voice note. There's just a lot of this sort of detritus, like a lot of the psychic and emotional detritus that would usually go in my diary, and I think it is sort of getting commandeered elsewhere in a way. So now my diary is a little intermittent — like once a week — and it's where I like write all the shit that I'm too embarrassed to bore my group chat with, or that I'm not ready to talk about in therapy yet, or I feel like I would like to have it more coherent before I bring it to my therapist.
I have therapy through Medicaid and God knows what's about to to Medicaid, so it's possible that I'm going to be like a very intense diary keeper again pretty soon. But yeah, it's just sort of been on and off my whole life. And I think that my most meticulous period of diary keeping was when I was in grad school because I really didn't feel like I talked to anyone about a lot of what was going on in my life. I was very cagey about things. I was working and I was writing in my diary one or two or three times a day, pages and pages and pages. I have so many diaries from that period.
You're in Waltham, you're definitely not hanging out in Waltham.
No, I was living in Davis Square.
You're living in Davis Square, why? Somerville? How do you end up in Davis Square and like, how do you end up at [redacted]?
There's a very like logistical answer to this, which is that they offered me the most money.
How did you decide to even apply to go school at [redacted]?
Well, there's also a very pragmatic answer there, which is that in college I did my undergraduate thesis on feminist revisions of fairy tales. And I wrote on three writers: Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, and Anne Sexton. There are so many things that intellectually occupied me, like narratives of sexual abuse, before I was like really putting a language to my own experiences with it. I wrote extensively in my undergrad thesis about Anne Sexton's fairy tale poems, which are like very obsessive about incest and sexuality. So there was a professor who had written this long psychoanalytic — she was an analyst and it was a little less literary and a little more psychoanalytical and like therapeutic in how she approached it — and she wrote about the Anne Sexton poem "Briar Rose," and it was this incredibly influential article for my thinking. And so when I went to apply for grad schools, I applied to, I think at the time there were only like a couple, maybe there were two or three places that did MFA PhDs, to those knowing I wasn't going to get in and I didn't. And then I applied to Duke because one of my mentors had really good connections there and had gone there And recommended it and there were like professors that I wanted to work with there. And then I applied I think to NYU and then [redacted] and maybe one other place.
So [redacted] came back and there was someone who I could ostensibly work on my dissertation with at the school and I had reached out to her prior and we were in contact. And then, also, I was still a little nervous about New York. I felt a little intimidated by New York. Boston kind of seemed like this happy medium as far as like city size went.
How long did it take you to sort of start sussing this story or trying to understand it for yourself and writing terms?
Well, I think I say in the book, right? I don't look I think I started writing it like right after the Access Hollywood tapes.
That's right. You do say that at the very beginning.
I mean, the last time I was assaulted was in 2015 and I just sort of like went underground for a year and then the Access Hollywood tapes happened and I had sort of been like keeping little notes in a private Twitter account. No one had access to it, it was just me. It was locked and I just wrote whatever like the most fucked up [stuff] that I thought about myself was and I would put it in there and it became a place where I was unloosing something in myself and it was a place to be very self -destructive and like to hate myself and feel like I could put that into words. But then, eventually, it felt like it evolved into something else where I was sort of getting angry and not just with myself, you know. I think I would like write these things and it was horrible, like horrible things, that I would say about myself. Eventually, there's only so many horrible things you can say about yourself. There's only so long a depressive episode can last, you know what I mean? There's always a boiling point. And, I think, after months of that, I kind of lost the thrill of being so disgusting to myself and I started getting pissed.
I think that when the Access Hollywood tapes happened, there are so many people that I knew and people that I really trusted who thought it was a real joke, you know? And that pissed me off. And I think that the origin point for the book was anger. I felt a deep rage and that is sort of what set me off writing.
I'm thinking about the rage because there is a certain sections that are angry, and there's also a lot of calling yourself names as if the Twitter account, but there is also a forgiveness in here of yourself that I think is really important to the book. And I think if it wasn't there, if it was only anger, it would get tiresome. For this book it feels like you're able to pull back the anger a little bit, not pull it back, but like find it in other ways and make it multi-dimensional.
I don't think that the book is angry. I think that when I wrote the book, and the form it ended up taking, I was kind of over that. I mean, this is 10 years ago, you know, and I was still very in the thick of like my coke era — I was 100 percent a nightmare party girl for several years. Parts of that were fun. Parts of that were self-destructive. Parts of that were unhealthy. But the rage period, I feel like that kind of dissipated by 2017. There were earlier iterations of this book that were much more animated by anger and rage and also maybe working from a more literary-critical position, which I think is very easy to write antagonistically, if you're operating as a critic.
I think that there's actually quite a shockingly little amount of anger in the book. I think the book invests a lot of its energy into making peace with myself and my past I don't think I'm trying to make peace with my rapists. I hope they all rot. I don't need to shore up the prison industrial complex or something like that, but I hope they're fucking dead.
The book wouldn't have been in the form that it's in if I hadn't been in a very healthy relationship when I began writing it, like in its current form, and if I hadn't been in therapy. I was very insistent about getting in therapy before I really dove into the book, because I wasn't in it before, and I was on a waitlist for a long time. And when I really got into the meat of the book, I don't know how I would have done it without having therapy there as a sort of scaffolding. So that and being in a relationship — I'm not with him anymore, but we had a really good run — and it demonstrated to me that I was lovable in a way that I had never understood before. It demonstrated to me that I could have a healthy and pleasurable sex life, which also had never been apparent to me before.
Is there anything that nobody has asked you about this book that you would like to be asked about it?
I don't know, I think it's kind hard to like invent questions that you wish yo were asked because I don't know. I do feel like...
What is something I missed? What is something that I missed? Because I'm sure I missed a lot. It's one of the reasons I took the book on.
You're probably like one of five men who will ever read this book. That's not my readership, but I don't know maybe that would be something that would be interesting: what was it like to read this not as a woman?
It's unsettling to read about your own sex [men]. It sucked. I don't know. None of these things ever across my mind and.. This is what I was going to write for the intro about it: this is a book that I think is important for men to read because of that, because somebody like me, I know it happens and I have friends that have had it happen to and I can't embody that person. Either side: the victim or the rapist. It is really troublesome because I can't feel the pain and I can't feel the desire either. It's fascinating to me in that way and then I want to know more because I don't understand. And it hurts me to not understand. I think it is important to read it. And it is important to be uncomfortable. I'm always trying to figure out what people are feeling.
It's interesting to me, because, I think, all of my interviews, besides this one, have been with women. And so it is sort of interesting. And I agree with you. Like for me, it does seem like men should be reading this book. I doubt many will, but it does feel like that is one thing that I hope like it reaches, one audience, I hope the book reaches.