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Trauma Plot by Jamie Hood
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Trauma Plot

A Life

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Narrator Jamie Hood

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Length 9 hours 34 minutes
Language English
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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

Jamie Hood is the author of how to be a good girl, one of Vogue’s Best Books of 2020, and regards, marcel, a monthly newsletter on Proust and other miscellany. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Baffler, Bookforum, The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, The Drift, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.

Jamie Hood is the author of how to be a good girl, one of Vogue’s Best Books of 2020, and regards, marcel, a monthly newsletter on Proust and other miscellany. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Baffler, Bookforum, The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, The Drift, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.

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Audiobook details

Author:

Narrator:
Jamie Hood

ISBN:
9798217065639

Length:
9 hours 34 minutes

Language:
English

Publisher:
Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group

Publication date:

Edition:
Unabridged

Libro.fm rank:
#2,488 Overall

Genre rank:
#10 in Literary Criticism

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Reviews

"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

"Piercing . . . . Trauma Plot flips the confessional memoir on its head."
Grace Byron, The Cut

"Provocative and incisive . . . . Hood’s unflinching prose ultimately serves as a bright herald to guide us through the battles that lie ahead."
—Harper's Bazaar

"A candid, at times hard to read recounting of sexual abuse."
—Bustle

"Kaleidoscopic . . . . Trauma Plot is a refusal of the silence around sexual violence, a tapestry woven by bloody fingers."
Erin Vachon, The Rumpus

"Jamie Hood is not only an uncommon thinker, but a world-class explorer of unthought. She descends into the terrifying dark of the unsayable with the dimmest of flashlights and returns bearing verbal gems, treasures, and marvels."
—Torrey Peters, bestselling author of Detransition, Baby and Stag Dance

"Hood’s writing in Trauma Plot is often devastating and difficult to reckon with, but it’s also deeply vital."
—The A.V. Club

"Rendered with raw-nerve clarity . . . . Hood’s writing is exceptional for its own sake."
—The Telegraph

"Hood is one of the most interesting literary critics writing today, and her excavation of trauma and survival is a wonder. Moving, thought-provoking, at once intellectual and deeply personal."
—LitHub

Trauma Plot is a sophisticated kind of life writing, and does something far more interesting than claim authenticity through the immediacy of experience."
—McKenzie Wark, e-flux

"[Hood] combines literary criticism, pop culture analysis, and personal narrative as part of this difficult but clear-eyed interrogation."
Autostraddle


"This book devastated me. I found my whole being thrumming with the energy of Hood's refusals, her intense thinking and feeling, the formal play with the modernist novel, and her clear-eyed reporting in the wake of trauma."
Kate Zambreno, author of Heroines

"Trauma Plot is an ode to the wrecked woman, the bloody battle of survivorship, and the act of writing itself—not because writing can save us, but because it reminds us we're still alive."
Melissa Lozada-Oliva, author of Dreaming of You and Candelaria

"A magnificent, norm-shattering work."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"Brilliant . . . with piercing intellect and lyrical prose, Hood redraws the boundaries of the tell-all memoir. It’s a rare feat of storytelling."
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
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