Jamie Hood’s new book, Trauma Plot, flips the confessional memoir on its head. In her piercing account of learning to live in a world defined by sexual violence, Hood weaves her personal story with analysis of the way the “rape survivor” has been flattened into a cultural archetype: a tragic woman doomed to carry the weight of society’s ills. Moving through decades of her own experience, Hood relocates from Boston to New York but can’t outrun the ghosts of her past. Instead, she dives deeper into the history of survivors — from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to David Lynch’s Laura Palmer. As Hood examines her own life with surgical precision, her story becomes one in a chorus of brutality. Nothing goes unexamined: the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh; the silent car ride home after being raped in her early 20s; the Access Hollywood tape blasting as she considers whether or not to file a police report. Survival, for Hood, requires an exorcism.
I first came to know Hood’s work through her first book, How to Be a Good Girl, a diaristic book of poems and observations exploring the erotic potential of dating men and walking in graveyards. Trauma Plot shifts away from the poetic form into the realm of harrowing nonfiction, weaving Hood’s personal story in with analysis of our political moment in which survivors feel tossed aside. And even if healing isn’t linear in Trauma Plot, Hood’s book offers something akin to hope. I spoke with Hood about her new book, the differences between writing criticism and memoir, and what justice means after Me Too.
Grace Byron: How did you end up writing this book? I know you’ve said before it took many years to complete.
Jamie Hood: The last assault I write about in the book took place during the summer of 2015. I didn’t talk about anything at all back then. But then the Access Hollywood tapes were released a couple weeks before the election. That’s the timeframe I ended up opening the book with. I was keeping a private Twitter where I excised the worst thoughts I had about my assault. Some of that material ended up in an early draft of the book. It was going to be a book-length poem until I felt it wasn’t a very feasible project. But when the Kavanaugh hearings happened, I thought maybe I should do something with these. The hearings really felt like one of the first major death knells for the Me Too movement. In her book, Christine Blasey Ford talks about the fact that she felt like she was believed and no one fucking cared. But back then, I was working four jobs. Then the pandemic happened, then I suddenly had no job and kind of didn’t know what to do. I’d been working on an essay called “Fucking Like a Housewife,” and when that came out it felt like my re-entry into the sort of writing that I wanted to do. Then the independent poetry press Grieveland reached out and I published How to Be a Good Girl.
For a while I thought I was never going to write Trauma Plot. Eventually my agent, Ayla Zuraw-Friedland, came to me and said we need to sell Trauma Plot, which was called Rape Girl at the time, “because otherwise you’re never going to finish it.” It felt like such a blockage inside me. I worried I wasn’t going to ever write another book if I didn’t get that one out. So we sold it in 2022, and the bulk of the writing happened in 2023.
G.B.: Why did you change the title?
J.H.: It was originally titled Rape Girl and it was my way of being confrontational about the title; it was sort of a joke I would make about myself. By the time I came to New York, I had been raped twice in the span of a little under a year back in Boston. I was here in New York for a little while, living my life, thinking I’m a new person, then I got raped again. I was like, Okay, that’s just who I am — “the rape girl.” I would occasionally go do poetry readings and I would read something, and of course, it was inevitably about rape. What happened was that when we sold the book, I was told by my publisher, and I don’t think they would get mad about me saying this, I was told that they would have to offer me half an advance, like half the amount of money that they they ultimately gave me, if we didn’t change the name. It wasn’t because they didn’t like it, or they were like, “How dare you, you’re so impolite, you’re disgusting.” It was because of the fact that Amazon won’t list books with the word rape in the title.
The title Trauma Plot is a reference — sort of a winking reference — to Parul Sehgal’s essay against the trauma plot that came out in The New Yorker. I think that there are aspects of the essay that feel very rigorous and smart and aspects of it that I find very reactionary. She created a phraseological phenomenon that then became shorthand for a lot of people who were much less rigorous than she was, who then used the term “trauma plot” as a way of dismissing any sort of traumatic narrative or testimony in art and literature and culture. I don’t agree with how she identified it, or how she necessarily critiques it, but I do think she identified a real phenomenon in literature.
G.B.: In many ways, your first book is a diary. This book has four interlocking structures and switches from first person to second person to third. Each takes on its own genre, too, sometimes it’s a riff on true crime or a thriller — the last section returns to the diary format. How did you end up with the structure for Trauma Plot that you did?
J.H.: I’ve done academic writing, I’ve done poetry, I’ve done literary criticism, I’ve done personal essay, I’ve done political writing, and I think that I get very bored when I’m in a specific mode for too long. I have to sort of be dancing at all times. That’s how my brain’s shaped at this point, in terms of the four-part structure, it was going to also be just three parts, and then I went into therapy. I thought, This actually feels too urgent for me to leave out. I actually need this process to be in here, even though I’m kind of suspicious of that kind of overreliance on therapeutic frameworks.
G.B.: Well it’s not like you say “now I’m better.”
J.H.: No. I was writing as it was happening. I would have a session and immediately after I would write as much as I could remember. I talked to my therapist and asked her about using our sessions. I said, “You’re part of this book, and this process is part of the book. Is that okay?” And she was like, “Yeah, absolutely.” I think that feels like, in a lot of ways, the most vulnerable part of the book.
G.B.: What do you make of the fact that there have been so many powerful men accused of assault recently and the vicious response by many right-wing men and women to shut down conversations about accountability? Or the fact that so many survivors have to turn to memoir or reporting rather than to a legal framework of justice?
J.H.: Obviously Me Too had multiple deflations. I think a lot of people see the Amber Heard–Johnny Depp trial as the closing of a door in some important way. That even a white, beautiful, wealthy celebrity could be so easily annihilated, and in such an obvious, politically engineered way — despite overwhelming evidence undergirding her allegations — proved that the relentless machine of misogyny hadn’t gone dormant or been defeated; it was only playing dead. Rayne Fisher-Quann wrote a really great essay on the trial and how it revealed Me Too as basically diversionary: a moment that “offered temporary catharsis in place of systemic change; Hollywood play-acted a revolution so its men could keep up their abuse unscathed.”
G.B.: Do you think the door is closed?
J.H.: I don’t think the door is closed, but I kind of don’t think there’s room for dissent. I’m not a cynic; I’m not a nihilist; I’m not an accelerationist or a doomer. But it’s just hard to look at what has happened over the past decade and to believe that people still want better things. I believe that there is the possibility of a better world. It just feels like the room for motion is so much less, and that’s terrifying to me.
G.B.: I’m curious what you think about the concept of justice. I didn’t report my own rape, and I wonder if we still think the courts can deliver on such lofty concepts or if we have to look elsewhere — or if justice is even the mode we’re operating in.
J.H.: I don’t know what it looks like. There was no point in time where I was like, I’m going to report. I went into a police precinct once, and it was after the last time I was raped, and it was because [the assailant] had robbed me and taken everything. My Social Security card was in there, my license, every sort of important document was in my wallet. Of course, you look back on that and think, What if I had just left my wallet at home and carried cash on me that night? But I went in, not even to report the rapes, but to see if I could find my wallet and and I was in there and the police laughed at me. You know, they laughed. It was not that it was even surprising to me. But it was paralyzing.
In terms of justice within this sort of apparatus of the state do I believe that there’s a pathway toward justice? I don’t. I can’t speak for what other people want in terms of retribution and rehabilitation. I don’t think that the state will ever serve victims of sexual violence; that is just not what it’s designed to do.
G.B.: Did you feel like writing the book was a form of justice?
J.H.: I don’t necessarily know if I believe art is justice—
G.B.: Or not even justice but just an alternative form of redress?
J.H.: Yeah, I think for me at least that’s felt true. It’s very funny going into a book about my rapes and being like I know this isn’t going to heal me and then I came out of it and thought, Well, I do feel a lot better. It was relieving; I was so suspicious of my own possible healing.
Beyond this story, the book gave me the opportunity to imagine what my desires were. What do I want? What does happiness look like? I thought I was nothing for three decades. I thought I was never going to have anything like love or pleasure. The book became in a way this imaginative field for me. Like a horizon of possibility.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
