The Optimism Of The Trauma Archivist

Emmeline Clein speaks to Jamie Hood about her new book 'Trauma Plot.'

Genre is a dangerous game for a girl with a sob story to play. Write a memoir and they’ll call you solipsistic, write a poem and they’ll put you on suicide watch, write a police report and they’ll call you a liar, stop speaking entirely and they’ll call you hysterical. Regardless, they’ll call you crazy, leaking sentimental fabulisms — a feminized contagion, infection by narrative. Find yourself in an Ovid elegy, and you might just end up in history’s “first rape joke,” as Jamie Hood observes in Trauma Plot, her memoir-cum-critical manifesto on survival, sexual trauma, Mrs. Dalloway, A Little Life, confessional literature, and ultimately, love.

The book is a coming of age and a coming to terms, an uncategorizable experiment in not exactly autobiography, but perhaps archaeology of the self; Hood calls herself “not a theorist of rape,” but an “archivist” of her own. “Dusty, disordered, a Babel of memory,” Trauma Plot is an earnest, wrenching project of translation, a feat of rendering the physical on the page. I was lucky enough to catch up with Hood the day before her book hit shelves, to talk temporality, MeToo, materialism, desire, Sylvia Plath, plot, and — if you can even believe it — optimism.

This book maneuvers between so many affects; it is operatic, violent, tender, hopeful. Channelling such a vast range of registers is a feat, one you achieved through pivoting among genres and perspectives. We start with criticism and then receive the memoir in three parts, narrated in first, third, and second person. You write about rape’s resistance to narrativization — the way rape ruptures time, and in turn warps the language of linear narrative. So I wanted to begin by asking about your formal approach.

I wanted to be formally strange in the book. I didn't want to write a conventional rape memoir. I have a slant approach to memoir because I don't see the self as a continuous thing. I don't think that there are eternal versions of our selves. I think we actually become different selves as our lives change. Writing in a fractured or fragmented way felt truer to my sense of myself and how I imagine identity to operate. But having the formal play enabled the project, it's what made writing the book possible. It facilitated a level of distance from the content at important moments that I really needed, and made the book survivable. Writing can be a re-experiencing, and writing can be re-traumatizing, and in this case it often was. Writing about myself as a character felt really vital to me, as was establishing a level of analytical distance.

That idea of multitudinous selves reminds me of a moment in How to Be a Good Girl — your 2020 poetry collection, which is being reissued now — when you cite Elizabeth Hardwick, who wrote that a “destiny of such violent self-definition does not always bring the real person nearer.” She was writing about Sylvia Plath, implying that perhaps that archetype of doomed femininity is just one possible storyline to trace her life through, not the “true” narrative.

The thing about that Hardwick quote is that I don't really buy it. I don't think her read of Plath was particularly brilliant. I love Elizabeth Hardwick, but I think that she, like a lot of women writers, has to disavow someone like Plath. There's something maybe a bit scary about embracing her. Sharon Olds once insinuated that she didn't model her career or her sense of confessionalism on people like Plath and Sexton because, essentially, look what happened to them. Plath and Sexton are not taken seriously in the way even Robert Lowell was. We can't be like them because we're real poets, right? We're serious. The other thing is, we don't want to kill ourselves. Maybe sometimes we do, but imagining our careers or our writing persona as too similar to someone like Plath — being close to that burning incandescence puts us in proximity to her death, too.

That self-protective impulse towards disavowing women it might feel dangerous — to both one’s writerly reputation and one’s literal life — to identify with is something you really fearlessly write against. Your tenderness towards “messy bitches,” women who have experienced trauma, your vitriol on their behalf, is really powerful. You also write deftly about the mind-body binary as it's been constructed to parallel the gender binary, which feels related to those disavowals you mentioned. Can you talk about the decision to open with criticism in that light?

The introduction happened last. On a purely logistical level, the first three chapters are very intensely in the 2012 to 2015 period, because that is when the rapes happened. The vast majority of the book is in a three-year period, and then I jumped from 2015 to 2024, for the therapy chapter. Writing in the present tense for a dialogic other allowed me to dart between different timelines, but there was something about that nine year gap that felt important to fill out, partly because so much happened politically. That gap was when MeToo happened, and when all of these deflations in MeToo also transpired. I needed to offer an anchor, a political and historical context for the book. I don't see my trauma, my story, as decontextualizable. I don't see it as singular, even though I see myself as singular. I am in a continuum and the suffering I experience is connected to the suffering of others; it's part of a systemic structure of violence.

You write that many critics of the trauma plot were approaching these texts paranoid, and without what you call the “rigor of generosity.” That rejection of the trauma plot first emerged in response to the idea that it had replaced the marriage plot, and around the MeToo moment. Do you think that critical stance has shifted or hardened in the current political moment, in the wake of MeToo, and the ascendance of the divorce plot, which is receiving a similarly condescending treatment?

I hadn't thought about that, but I keep getting commissions to write about the divorce plot, and I hadn't recognized how consolidated the repudiation of it is. But I think you're right — particularly with some of the pieces that came out around Haley Mlotek, Leslie Jamison, and Rachel Cusk’s books. Is the divorce plot the replacement for the trauma plot? A divorce plot is a trauma plot in a way. It's not necessarily a plot of violence, but I think that the critical condescension towards the divorce plot comes from a similar place as the case against the trauma plot. The repudiation of the trauma plot feels in a line of continuity with the repudiation of confessional poetry, and women's confessional art.

All of these things operate from a place of skepticism to women's work that comes from life. I think that has to do with many things, bodily interest in women's art, those fascinations or fixations are treated as proof positive that we're not also intellectuals, right? That we don't have this analytical heft that men do. Which is funny because Knausgaard can write 500 pages about taking a shit and no one is going to say he's not serious. He's a Nobel winner. Why can't we write about our bodies? I feel like I'm getting off track.

No, you're perfect. In my Google Meets, we love digressions.

[Laughs] Back to the political moment and the critical moment, as far as I can see, I don't know that people are talking about trauma plots anymore, and maybe that has to do with the political moment. I have a deep resistance to cynicism, and I think that this book is deeply hopeful. The book is oriented towards change, and desirous of sexual revolution. Yes, the re-election of Trump feels incredibly frightening and it does feel like, well, what do these stories do? I think they still matter. Women's stories matter. They just do.

I'm obviously proud of the book and I think that it will help people. I think that the question of whether critics are still interested in the trauma plot or rape narratives has nosedived a bit either because there was a hyper-saturation, or because there's this feeling that we have a legally proven rapist in the presidency. We have a GOP that makes a habit out of saying things like “your body, my choice.” They do these things with impunity. It can feel like the value of the storytelling is person to person. What it does on a political, structural level, I don't know. And I feel sort of demoralized by that thought.

It's certainly demoralizing out here. But what you said about the book’s desire for revolution really resonates, and offers a foothold for optimists — you write desire as utterly ungovernable, which allows for its violent patriarchal manifestations, yes, but also its reparative and pleasurable and surprising manifestations. In the final line of the introduction, you write that your story is a series of “shards, violent and strange,” that you dance among. How do you maintain your optimism?

It’s funny, so many things have been useful over the last several years. Therapy has been hugely important, but I think the thing that healed me more than anything was being in a healthy sexual relationship, and learning to love sex — I hate to use a cliche word — but reclaiming my body and my sensuality. I think it's funny that I've made a career out of writing about desire because I don't know exactly what it is. The authors I write about a lot, like Annie Earnaux, I think for her desire is also the great knot. The revolution is indescribable, desire is indescribable. That's part of what makes it desire, it's deferred, it's always over there.

Once a desire is satiated or quenched, maybe it dissolves a little bit. It reproduces itself, and that's another thing that orients toward optimism for me. I feel full of desire all the time, and not just sexual desire. That wasn't necessarily true for me for a long time, particularly around sex. I knew how to perform sex well. I knew how to perform pleasure. I did it in service of men's pleasure. I didn't know how to ask for what I wanted, and now I do. Being loved and being fucked well sort of gave me this sense of purpose again.

That process of learning to vocalize your desire while simultaneously reckoning with its amorphous, unknowable nature feels related to the way both your books trace women’s attempts to counter the historical censorship of our speech, especially when that speech is first person, is confessional. I love the line in Good Girl about the bad girl’s speech, the way her words are heretical by default. What is it like to have these two books out at the same time?

Good Girl was almost a side plot to Trauma Plot. When I was commissioned to write that book, I thought what I would do was treat Good Girl like a chapbook that would then lead into Trauma Plot. I did not want to write about rape in that book. I allude to it, but I wanted to write about femininity and how I was conceptualizing that in that particular period. It's a pandemic diary. What does womanhood mean to me when I'm not perceivable? When I'm trapped in a house, what does my womanhood look like? How does that interface with my desire? What do I, how do I fuck? It culminates in this love story, which Charlotte Shane and I have talked about. We both ended up writing these very traditional stories. She's like, “I wrote the escort memoir that ends in me falling in love with this guy,” and I wrote this traumatized book about desire that ends in me falling in love. They are kind of marriage plot books in a way. Good Girl ended up being the place where I was able to interrogate womanhood outside of the rape book because I was so disgusted by the way that people would insinuate to me, and some would say it very baldly, that I was a woman because I had been raped.

That is so horrifying. Trauma Plot deftly historicizes the archetypally untrustworthy woman speaker. I wonder about the tension between rape potentially rendering a woman paradigmatically feminine — in its shattering of her language that was already assumed to be illogical — while simultaneously ‘ruining’ her womanhood?

Trauma does that, right? It's a very second wave, Rad Fem argument. That one of the most foundational aspects of being a woman is to be violated by men. Structural violence by men against women is the thing that formulates gender. But it did feel like you become this incredibly discreditable narrator of your experience the second that you come forward about sexual violence. Yet there was a very hyper-contradictory maneuver where suddenly the violence rendered my womanhood believable to people who otherwise would be antagonistic to my womanhood. I feel very animated by Rebecca Solnit's idea that all rape is corrective and operates correctively in terms of gender. I think that I was predisposed to sexual violence because I was perceived as a gender deviant. Maybe my womanhood was not in question, and it is not a product of the rape, but rather the tension between my womanhood and what the world believes about my womanhood is partly what put the target on my back.

All of that is to say that I wanted to be able to reckon with womanhood and femininity and what it meant to be recognizable as a woman. I was also reading Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl very intensely and obsessively. I was thinking a lot about the way that girlhood interfaces with capital, about sex work, and how it felt very radical and revolutionary and against the grain of capitalism, but is also a purely transactional frame of understanding my sexual life.

You really capture the incursions of capital into sexuality, girlhood, and art production. You have a guttingly witty way of pointing out how capital is undergirding all of this violence just as much as misogyny. Can you talk about the choice to take such a materialist approach?

It is an important notion to me intellectually, because Good Girl was a pandemic book, and then Trauma Plot has been written in the wake of the pandemic. I'm thinking about how much my social milieu changed in New York, post-pandemic. So many artists were exiled from the city, and then we saw the re-consolidation of certain forms of capitalism post-pandemic, and the consolidation of wealth. For a little while, there was this feeling that actually, things were about to change because so many rich people fled during the pandemic. But then, of course, they all came back and, everyone was suddenly like, oh, my rent is now three times what it was.

Yeah, it was ultimately sort of like MeToo in that way.

[Laughs] Yes, but, you know, there's a dual interest for me. One, the deliberate interest is that I'm a working writer, I come from a working class background, and I find it's truly an uphill battle to be a writer in this city and to not have inherited wealth, period. So, one is to make a case for space for working class people in the arts. The other thing is this idea of inextricability, which is that the material conditions of my life were functionally barely survivable until I sold Good Girl. I made enough money that I could scale back my bartending and devote part of my life to writing. Up until that point, all of my work was bodily. I was bartending six nights a week, I was doing sex work, my body was on the front lines of this deeply tenuous struggle towards survivability.

In Trauma Plot, there is something that is alluded to, but was not framed as explicitly as it could be, which is that the men who raped me in New York also robbed me. I was living on couches, between apartments at the time. Because my stuff was in storage, I had all of my important documents in my wallet, and they robbed me, stole my identity, and ran up all these credit card bills. That in and of itself felt like a crystallization of all of these problems. It's so literal and on the nose that the men who raped me stole my identity — my de-subjectivization in a legal manner. There was no way I was going to be able to tell a story about the rapes that I endured without it having to do with my precarious position, financially and sexually.

That question of physical precarity, and doing very bodily work, brings me back to the question of temporality, because our sensorial experience of time is so difficult to put into language. Why did you choose to close within a therapeutic timeline? Was there something about the enforced constraint of the idea of a session that allowed you to access new openings or ruptures in the linear narrative?

That was the part of the book I didn't anticipate being part of the book. When I sold the book, it was in nine parts. Three were memoiristic, three were poetic, and three were literary critical. I was going to position it as a deeply literary critical book, and the memoir was going to almost be subsidiary. When I began writing, I shaved a lot of that off and saw that I really needed to face the rape stories head on. The therapy became totally inextricable from the book because the deep writing happened in tandem with the deep therapy. It was a very bodily experience, despite being on zoom. About eight or nine weeks in, I started being able to sense when the hour was almost up and I wouldn't check the time. I would suddenly say, oh, I think we're nearing time, and then Helen would say something, like I'm mindful of our time.

You end the book on that note, with the line “I’m mindful of our time.” Recalling the opening, which can be read as a polemical defense of survivors of sexual trauma, the choice to end by evincing such respect and care for your readers’ experience felt so tender. I'm not surprised to hear you say the book was originally literary critical, because that analysis feels like the groundwater beneath the text. I'll be mindful of your time, so I just have one more question. You're a completely ingenious critic, and I'm curious about the way being a professional critic informed your approach to memoir. There’s often a distrust or a tension between those two modes.

After Good Girl, I thought to myself, I'm not going to write about myself for two years. I shifted gears to criticism. I had worked as a scholar, but I hadn't really written about books for magazines before. Learning how to do that and how to communicate to a broader audience, while also still demonstrating intellectual rigor, felt really important. It facilitated deliberation and distance that made writing the book actually possible, which is to say, being a working critic helped me look at my own life from a place of slight remove, which I think was indispensable to the process. I had to be able to separate a little bit.

How do we write about the worst things that happen to us without becoming entrenched in them? I was very scared that this book was going to eat me alive. In the worst parts of it, the critical stance gave me dexterity. How do I manage to be honest and vulnerable, and not an alien observing my life? Jumping between forms and perspectives is how I achieved that balance. I was able to spend two weeks writing the scene where I'm in the car with my rapist, and then I would step back and edit the Dalloway chapter. Then I would do that for a bit, and then I'd write about the gang rape. I blocked these things out very carefully and thoughtfully in terms of both my time and my energy, and also where I was emotionally.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.