Why We're Still Talking About the ‘Trauma Plot'

The Atlantic

01-04-2025

Nothing amplifies a popular trend more than a prominent critic making a noisy case against it. In her 2021 polemic, 'The Case Against the Trauma Plot,' the literary critic Parul Sehgal argued that trauma had become a central feature of contemporary literature. In too many recent novels, she observed, characters looked to the buried pain of the past as an explanation for the present; this type of story, she said, 'flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom.' The essay sparked an ongoing debate in the literary community: Has trauma indeed become the dominant plot, and is fiction worse off for it? Or is processing a difficult past on the page still valuable, both for the writer and the reader?
Jamie Hood defiantly sets out to reclaim the trauma plot by doubling down on it, beginning with the title of her debut memoir, Trauma Plot: A Life. Implicit in her project is an acknowledgment that human beings will always have deeply upsetting experiences, and they will always write about them. The only question is how. Hood tries to answer that question through an utterly original recounting of her own past.
Hood is a shrewd critic, and she is informed by the work of authors including Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath, whose writings allow her to challenge the idea that there's something uniquely contemporary about trauma plots (or indeed in the criticism of them). Hood is troubled by Sehgal's framing of the phenomenon, which seems to 'exile' writers 'from self-knowledge.' She identifies what she sees as an underlying assumption guiding arguments against this kind of writing—that those who write books about their pain are not producing art: 'Like there's no reason to write about trauma except to make a buck. Like if you talk about having lived through something awful, that's all you've ever talked about or ever will. Like you have no agency inside a story you yourself choose to tell.'
In Trauma Plot, Hood investigates her past and present with startling honesty and curiosity. 'I began writing this book in 2016, a year after five men gang raped me and around the time the Access Hollywood tapes were leaked to the public,' she writes. The #MeToo movement demonstrated to Hood that experiences of sexual assault were not 'exceptional,' and that they could be spoken about and shared. The accounts she read broke the silence that frequently surrounds rape, and refused to fall into existing narratives of shame or victimhood.
'For most of my life no one I knew talked about rape,' Hood writes, 'so there were many years when I thought it happened to every heroine of every Lifetime movie and to me.' These kinds of films, she writes, smooth over the experience of rape into straightforward cause and effect: Sexual assault leads to grieving and then healing, which a brave heroine can achieve by looking for some kind of lesson. Hood searches for new ways to tell her story, forms that depart from familiar scripts.
One place where Hood finds such inspiration is in the myth of the Athenian princess Philomela, from Ovid's Metamorphoses. While on her way to visit her sister, Philomela is deceived and raped by Tereus, her brother-in-law. When she threatens to reveal what he did, Tereus cuts out her tongue, leaving her mute. But Philomela learns to weave, creating a tapestry that tells the story of her assault. Hood imagines herself as Philomela, finding alternative means of expressing the truth: 'I had a need of my own to reckon with the way rape resists testimony or explodes the containers of its own telling, without in turn surrendering to the convention that trauma is, as it were, altogether intelligible. With tongue or without, the story will out.'
Like Philomela, Hood experiments with structure to speak the unspeakable and show the splintering effects of sexual assault (in her case, what she describes as several separate incidents of rape). Trauma Plot is divided into four parts, each of which is written from a different perspective: 'She,' 'I,' 'You,' 'We.' In each section, Hood doesn't just try to understand her own experiences; she wrestles with the limits of language when trying to represent deep personal pain.
Part I, 'She,' is an homage to Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, following a character Hood calls Jamie H. (in the third person) on the day she and her roommate are planning to throw a party. In Boston in October 2012, Jamie wakes up, commutes to Waltham, teaches classes, meets with an adviser, and, yes, buys the flowers herself, all while she is haunted by what she calls the 'Specter'—a leering, disembodied smile that has followed her since that summer. She searches for traces of a 'fracturing' June night in her diary; though she knows what happened to her, she is 'unable to look on it directly, for it signaled a kind of cognitive eclipse.' Near the end of the section, Jamie finally confronts the event, revealing that a man she calls the Diplomat raped her. Here, the perspective snaps from 'she' to 'I,'; Jamie reflects that she 'must yield the mantle of the third person' in order to 'face the Diplomat stripped of distance.'
This 'I' is the dominant voice of Part II, which begins, 'Two months before the bombing of the Boston Marathon I was raped again.' Here, Hood employs the kind of first-person testimony common to the trauma plot. But she tells her story at a slant, intertwining her second rape and its aftermath with an account of the Boston Marathon bombing, a triple murder in Waltham, and her decision to leave Boston for New York City. In February 2013, Hood describes being drugged and assaulted by 'the Man in the Gray Room,' who then offers to drive her home the next morning. The entire chapter seems to snag on that detail, as Hood imagines it undermining her account: 'That accepting this from him would undercut the veracity of my victimization didn't matter, because nothing did. The decision was automatic, and marvelously practical. I'd no clue where I was, no money, and could barely walk. I knew already I wouldn't report, so there'd be no rape kit, no interrogation or lawyers, no judge, no testimony, no jury.'
Yet Hood knows that her book is a testimony. She writes about her memories carefully, always aware that her reader is forming judgments about her credibility. To such people, Hood shows viscerally how the idea of the perfect victim, beyond reproach or doubt, is a fantasy. After all, she still has to live: 'In the movies, they make it seem like your whole life stops when you get raped, but I kept arriving at the awful truth that nothing about it would stop, and I still had to wake up each day and do the same stupid, boring shit I did every other day and would have to go on doing until the end.' As she juggles teaching, writing a dissertation, grading papers, and working extra hours as a transcriptionist, Hood dissociates, turning to alcohol, drugs, and calorie restriction.
In the introduction to her book, Hood writes that 'I am, I confess, not a theorist of rape, only an archivist of my own.' In the final two sections, she fully embraces this role: Part III, 'You,' set in New York in August 2013, revisits her journals from that period, separating Hood the diarist (earnest, hurting, recently arrived in a new city) from Hood the biographer (critical, distant, seasoned). Here she wryly quotes passages from her old writings, puncturing her past fantasies: 'It seems to me,' she writes to her earlier self, 'you've no notion of what you yourself desire.'
Part IV, 'We,' is set in the present, as Hood begins therapy. Perhaps the most gripping part of 'We' is when Hood assembles a chronology of her 'life and trauma' for her therapist, Helen. 'What if I pretended that the plot was linear, and of a piece?' she writes. Hood never shows this chronology to Helen, but lays it out—with some redactions—for the reader. This document is powerful to read toward the end of the memoir: It makes clear just how much Trauma Plot resists linear storytelling in order to reflect the disordered, fragmented experience of sexual assault.
Hood doesn't indicate whether she feels like she has healed from her past, or what it would look like if she had. But Trauma Plot unambiguously demonstrates her growth as a writer. Like Philomela, Hood alchemizes her suffering into something new. In her first book, the essay-poetry hybrid How to Be a Good Girl: A Miscellany, she mentioned the memoir she was trying to write. 'I bite the inside of my cheek & say (again) this is not my rape / book this is not my rape book this is not my rape book / every book is my rape book,' she wrote; 'my rape book is 300 pages long & / i will never finish writing it.' I was moved to reach the end of Trauma Plot and realize that Hood has finished her 'rape book' (or one of them) and written it according to her own rules.
In a session with Helen, Hood talks about her sense of wasted time. 'I'm nearly forty and I've only just started living,' she reflects. 'I want to be OK with this. But it's hard not to dream of other lives, and maybe that dream is the current that carries me to writing.' This is the parallel plot of the book—Hood's artistic development alongside her pain. She ends with a burst of hope that calls to mind Molly Bloom's ecstatic soliloquy at the end of James Joyce's Ulysses: 'I have hope again! I do! I don't know my desire, yes, and yet I'm filled with it. And I think, yes, of all I still have to write. Everything left to do.' Hood's engagement with her own trauma plot doesn't flatten or distort her story; instead, it expands her craft, her ambition, her desire, and her life.