Meet Jamie. A book character, a woman, a friend. She is a reliable narrator and someone people would call a survivor; of multiple assaults, of life. And—not but, but an active and—Jamie Hood, the author behind her eponymous character, is a writer unafraid of excavating her experience as material. Trauma Plot is a memoir that reclaims the derided titular concept. The book does so not as an obligation for writers to mine their most personal and awful experiences for a story, but by presenting the trauma plot as an objective truth that can be personal—one of many stories a writer can tell, not their defining narrative.

Hood says this best in the introduction to her book: “Trauma plots are not above evaluation…what troubles me in this increasingly consolidated recoil is its wholesale exile of authors from self-knowledge—the subterranean, insidious idea of our relation to writing as unexamined, crude, and lacking competence with self-reflexivity, humor, and play.” Trauma Plot not only evaluates the ways in which trauma-mining has become increasingly popular over the last decade, but also indicts the now 10-year-old critical notion that writing about trauma is somehow a predictable course of action for writers who choose to turn their most negative life experiences into a voicey victim-to-valor narrative. Hood argues that when we treat trauma narratives as crafty cash grabs or ploys for sympathy, “The ethical crime of storytelling is handily shifted back onto the person recording their victimization: you are the vector of damage.” Trauma becomes, as she puts it, an “infection” that seeks to take everyone else down with the writer. In a meta way, the backlash for sharing your own worst-things-ever in writing is its own form of trauma plot; honesty leads to public scrutiny, punishment. Hood doesn’t refuse the critique, she does something even more radical: exercises agency not just over herself in recounting her trauma, but in writing about it to begin with.

Trauma Plot is structured in four parts labeled “She,” “I,” “You,” and “We.” In that order, the book sets up a migrating viewpoint, shifting deftly between third, first, and second person perspectives to show not only the de- and hyperpersonalization inherent in processing rape, but also the ways in which narrative itself becomes a site of struggle for survivors. “She” and “I” both take place in Boston, where character-Jamie and then Hood-as-“I” are working on their PhD dissertation on “women’s projects of self-making in the postwar period,” but “slant.” These first two sections are graphic retellings that are difficult to read. Not only does Hood describe what happened to character Jamie with dastardly specificity, she describes it omnisciently; she is the “She,” but she needed to depersonalize to survive. Only in “I” are readers invited to re-enter Jamie’s mind, and we do so with her as an autobiographer. Her life implodes and we read it from two completely different vantages; the past memory of “She,” character-Jamie, and “I,” Hood-as-self who returns into her own body only to find anguish. She must flee to New York City, leaving her program at school, her friends. The intentional disorientation is a literary technique which, when coupled with the subject matter, gives the finger to traditional critique of the trauma plot as whiny, predictable among victims. To paraphrase from the book’s introduction, Hood isn’t in it to make the worst thing that ever happened to her a key part of who she is. She’s just here, and she’s writing her ass off, with masterful narrative skill and sheer technique—of her then-boyfriend Charlie toward the middle of “She,” she says “…he’s proven to her, in some awful, ineluctable fashion, that men demanded perpetual darning. You could fret and fret at the holes mottling their lives until there was no time left for the repair of your or anyone else’s woes. And then you’d be stuck there, strung up all filled with your own emptiness, flapping feebly in the breeze.” Every description is a gut punch, exposing a wounded self in recovery and reformation.

By “You,” Jamie is in New York, she’s a bartender, she’s poor, she’s still finding her tether to earth, she’s gang-raped in an assault orchestrated by a regular at her place of work. Her depression reaches an apex at the middle of the chapter, when Jamie’s depersonalization mixes sourly with self-inculpation, urgently circling the drain of suicidal ideation. “You” presents the idea that ‘You might as well not be you’. In this section, Jamie oscillates between extreme self-analysis and self-exploration, repeatedly reaching the same conclusion from a point of remove: despite being a victim of sexual assault, she can justify herself a villain again and again if she tries hard enough. This is the function of the second-person, to make the “you” an interrogative between character-Jamie and Hood-as-author, and it’s brilliant in highlighting the personality removal that comes along with justifying one’s despair. She comes to a shattering conclusion when a man named Felix comes over to her place—a man whom everyone around her seems to want to bed. She quotes her diary: “You are the engineer of your anguish. Why can’t you pull yourself up from the muck? But there’s something ‘untenable’ in you, something ‘monstrous. They all see it. How I’m just a fuck hole.’”

But “We” is different—not hopeful per se, but arriving at a welcome sense of actualization for Jamie. Here, she finally allows herself the space to process her trauma with a mental health professional named Helen, whom she meets regularly on Fridays over Zoom. Like part “I,” this section is written in the first-person, however Jamie’s perspective has shifted. The dissociated state that came along with her rapes blooms gradually into her own kind of acceptance through her sessions with Helen. At the end of the earlier “We” chapters, Helen’s repetition of “I’m mindful of our time” turns from a classic therapy technique to a literary refrain, where Jamie is able to feel time again, to be in her body again, even repeating the phrase herself at the end of a chapter as the book draws to a close. Beyond hope, Jamie discovers an open-ended want for more life. Hood possesses the unique ability to write herself from myriad perspectives, returning to the “I” in this final part of the book to forcefully reclaim her self with language. She is no longer a passenger in her body, and we no longer read her story from a passive voice. She writes, “…as time passes, abjection feels less useful to me, I think because I want to be a subject in my life, an active player… This image of myself as emptied—it only reinforces the notion that I was ruined, that I’m beyond repair, and I don’t believe that. I can’t.”

The conclusion Trauma Plot arrives at requires a bit of chewing before swallowing. It involves holding space for both the harrowing effects of trauma as well as the humanity of the person who experienced it in narrative form. Culturally, we are not as readily able to do this as we are to critique the trauma plot as Lauren Bennett did in her 2015 Slate piece called “The First-person Industrial Complex,” which Hood mentions in the book’s introduction. Trauma Plot can walk and chew gum at the same time: It shrouds the subject by switching between third, first, and second-person perspectives, only to highlight the power of the first-person, a reclamation of the I as to re-ify it as a tool for self-discovery. The author demonstrates remarkable and at times crushing self-awareness in the interstitial moments of levity between her rapes where dissociation is the only relief for both character-Jamie and the reader. But emotional removal isn’t the end for her, nor should it be for audiences—it’s not the most satisfying ending, and that is the point. Trauma Plot asks and answers a fundamental question character-Jamie had for her dissertation: “What if writing from life, this giving an account of oneself, was, in fact, the technique by which one composed a self?”