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
, 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?
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.