Trauma Plot

A Life

De: Jamie Hood

Narrado por: Jamie Hood

From a rising literary star and the author of how to be a good girl comes a brilliant, biting, and beautifully wrought memoir of trauma and the cost of survival

"Hood descends into the terrifying dark of the unsayable with the dimmest of flashlights and returns bearing verbal gems, treasures, and marvels. Trauma Plot is a glass case of such wonders."—Torrey Peters, bestselling author of Detransition, Baby

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 Trauma Plot, 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?

Trauma Plot 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.

Cover image: Philomela by John Gregory. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Archives, Philadelphia

©2025 Jamie Hood (P)2025 Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

A Most Anticipated Book by Vogue, Vulture, Bustle, LitHub, The A.V. Club, and Autostraddle

"There’s nothing remotely easy about this book . . . but the tale that Hood tells dives deep and is richly layered and worth reading . . . . Hood has been vulnerable and she has been strong, and it’s the strong Hood who emerges victorious from Trauma Plot. You’ll be rooting for her through every page of this searing memoir."—Vogue

"An innovative, rigorous, genre-bending, and ultimately life-affirming account of what it takes to survive."—Vulture

"A candid, at times hard to read recounting of sexual abuse . . . . [Hood] addresses that, in the literary world, the “trauma plot” has fallen out of fashion; that people are tiring of bodies that keep the score. And yet, there is still a power in a woman telling her story."—Bustle

powerful

This isn’t an easy read/listen but it’s a beautifully poignant story on survival and overcoming horrors that are too often experienced.