written By
For the last third of her memoir, Trauma Plot, Jamie Hood is in therapy. This fifth and final section of the book is composed almost exclusively of scenes of Hood in Zoom sessions with her therapist, where, in stream-of-consciousness prose, she grapples with not just the trauma of being raped multiple times, but the difficulties she faces in articulating this trauma during the writing process of Trauma Plot. In one session, Hood muses, “Art, in my view, should transport those who encounter it, should be larger than itself. The act of turning my rapes into an art object, making of them a kind of thing, presupposes that this thing does more than record or relay a sequence of events. The thingness of my survival mandates import.” But how is one to craft a narrative arc when, as Hood states in a later session, “Rape is the opposite meaing[?]” In the Introduction, Hood offers a “diagnosis of rape as a formal problem,” that neccesitates adopting, “a kaleidoscopic technique of narration,” to tell her story, a form that reflects all the ways trauma corrupts time, plot, meaning, and, ultimately, one’s self.
The memoir is divided into five sections, and save for the more traditionally straightforward critical mode of the Introduction, each adopts a new perspective, shifting from third-person to first-person to second-person to a meta-craft-analysis-making-of of the book itself (the aforementioned section set in therapy). Each formal shift captures a truth of trauma: that it reconfigures one’s relationship to oneself.
Part I, “She,” of Trauma Plot is a Mrs. Dalloway pastiche that meticulously recounts a single day in the life of grad student “Jamie H.” as she constantly slips in and out of dissociative states due to the trauma of a rape from earlier that year. The section opens with Jamie noticing that the oven is on in the morning, with no memory of ever having turned it on. “For months she’d been losing time. Loosing time, she’d say, as if time were an object, a set of keys, say, or a passport, a thing one held and could, in turn, misplace, though it felt rather that time had lost her[.]” The section tracks every turn Jamie’s attention takes, constantly oscillating from focusing on the world as she moves about her day—buying flowers, talking to colleagues on the train to campus, preparing for a Halloween party—and her interior digressions, thoughts, and memories.
In most books, these swaths of mental rumination would be presented as occurring simultaneously with the action, but Hood makes clear that time unspools linearly across her paragraphs: when Jamie retreats inward into her mind, time continues to progress externally, meaning that when she regains awareness of her physical surroundings, she has no recollection of what occurred around her because she wasn’t cognizant to it. Her mind and body cannot cohere into one continuous consciousness, and the baton of narration is passed back and forth between the two; to capture that separation, Jamie H.’s persona must occupy the space of the third-person. This is still the uninterrupted present—in the sense that the narrative recounts “the now” as Jamie experiences it—but it is a present partially composed of the past.
In her infamous New Yorker piece, “The Case Against the Trauma Plot,” critic Parul Sehgal takes many qualms with the trauma plot, one of which is that “Unlike the marriage plot, the trauma plot does not direct our curiosity toward the future (Will they or won’t they?) but back into the past (What happened to her?),” conflating trauma with “backstory,” but this is a false understanding of trauma’s relationship to time. Sehgal positions trauma as a discrete event, one that is over and done with and is thereafter recounted, instead of as an enduring experience. While individual traumatic moments pass, trauma itself lingers, informing one’s present. “Then, of course, the past was not dead,” as Hood writes. “Any border between it and the present was a fiction, a fable conjured to cover the shame of where we came from. The humiliation of having been in process, having been, as it were, a person.”
This troubled sense of time informs the dissolution of Jamie’s sense of self. In a later part of the memoir, once the character “Jamie H.” becomes “you,” Hood writes, citing her old diary entries, “‘I am more and more permeable,’ you write, ‘my boundaries are diminished. There is no self.’” Trauma—rape—strips Hood of the ability to situate herself in time, in place, in her body, and without this, there is no self for her to situate.
This is not the first time Hood has written about her troubled relationship with her sense of personhood. Her previous book, how to be a good girl—a hybrid work of poetry, diary, criticism, and memoir, which released in 2020—revolves around how men’s perception of women informs our self-construction and self-worth. In gorgeously lyrical, philosophical lines, Hood questions what it means to be a woman in relation to men, how she defines herself, and what she is composed of as a woman:
[…] do i exceed my role do i
need more than the possibilities of my representation
should i present the hole
of my self
shall i open my legs for this!
Even the spacing of the line “my self” indicates that Hood views herself not as a full person, but as a hole, an absence, a negation, a void defined by outside forces. Her essay, “Fucking Like a Housewife,” in The New Inquiry, published the same year as how to be a good girl, contains similar themes, with Hood writing: “I flounder in the foggy potentiality that there is no coherent I to debase.” Across Trauma Plot, Hood repeatedly refers to herself as a space or object: “I was a vacancy. A room without any people in it. […] I was a mirror through which time passed. […] I saw I wasn’t a child then, or even a person really, but a place—the place where rape went, and where rape belonged.”
The erasure of selfhood that Hood experienced due to trauma means that there must be something else to fill the self’s place on the page, and that something else is form. As she switches perspective again and again in Trauma Plot, Hood parses through different incarnations of herself—“She,” “I,” “You,”—and finds a synthesis of self only accessible through writing, drawing attention to herself as simultaneous creator and subject of creation on the page:
I must remember I’m Leda, not Yeats. I’m Philomela, not Ovid. Or maybe I’m all of them; maybe I need, in this book, to demonstrate the fact that I can do it all, that I might be the sufferer and the engineer of that suffering’s narrative. In writing the story, I enlarge myself—not perhaps, in a sense of overcoming, but by eliding the trap. No longer feeling I’m nothing but this story. Because I am more, and by so much.
It is in writing that she becomes more than her story—in its formal composition, she is able to erect a full persona from the shards of her fragmentation.
Construing rape as a formal problem also deflates the (still somehow prevalent) sexist notion that writing about trauma is somehow unmitigated or unartful, that it’s a profusion of emotion with no forethought or effort. As the writer T Kira Madden writes in the essay, “Against Catharsis: Writing is Not Therapy,” in Lit Hub, “I want us to de-romanticize the way we’d like to read and describe memoir—voyeristic and raw and vulnerable and brave—and […] admit that all writing, all art, is projection, illusion, a performance.” Hood is more than willing to point to this performance—aka, her writing craft—throughout Trauma Plot, most notably in the final section, Part IV, “We,” the title of which gestures at the therapeutic relationship at its center as well as the dual role Hood occupies as narrative architect and subject in writing.
As she thinks out loud in her therapy sessions, Hood deconstructs the ways she may or may not approach her rapes as she writes Trauma Plot, both creatively and in response to cultural attitudes regarding rape stories. It’s a meta stream of consciousness that draws attention to the inherent paradox of stream of consciousness: Hood’s thinking is presented as unmediated and messy narratively, but is also necessarily sculpted by virtue of being written in the first place. She affirms the thoughtfulness of her craft by making the emotional and intellectual difficulty of writing about rape her subject; the form is a synthesis of the raw and the rigorous. “I’ve written one hundred thousand words on my trauma,” Hood says in one therapy session. “Is that unintelligibility? Rape effaced me and yet I speak it. […] This pretense of wordlessness is a tool of the tormentor. It doesn’t serve.”
Uncharitable, misogynistic interpretations of trauma writing will not silence Hood. Her voice joins a chorus of other women who’ve also written of rape, sexual assault, sexual violence, and violence against women in formally creative ways, including Elissa Washuta in her 2021 essay collection, White Magic, Natasha Trethewey in her 2020 memoir, Memorial Drive, Jeannie Vanasco in her 2019 memoir, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, Carmen Maria Machado in her 2019 memoir, In the Dream House, Lacy M. Johnson in her 2014 memoir, The Other Side, and Lidia Yuknavitch in her 2011 memoir, The Chronology of Water. What all of these writers understand is that form must fit function: that if a story breaks you, you break the story in order to tell it. Trauma Plot’s formal invention is so engaging because it functions as both a mode of critical engagement in and of itself, in addition to being an emotional vessel for Hood’s experience.
The trauma plot narrative is not a monolith, nor should it be summarily dismissed because of its diagnostics. Trauma Plot is a repudiation of these silencing criticisms, a testament to the artful capacity of trauma writing, and—most importantly—a fantastic memoir.
