Author Jamie Hood on writing through trauma and against cultural currents

Warning: Contains description of sexual assault.

When Jamie Hood decided to publish her recent memoir, Trauma Plot: A Life, she was fully aware of the backlash to #MeToo and a seeming dismissal of accounts of sexual violence. In fact, she said these cultural crosscurrents propelled her to finish the book.

Hood recently spoke with Clayman Institute Writer in Residence Moira Donegan as part of her Feminism in Theory and Practice event series. Donegan suggested it was a “defiant statement” to publish a book detailing multiple sexual assaults in a time when such accounts might be seen as against the grain or off-trend.

The #MeToo movement offered recognition that sexual violence survivors weren’t alone, Hood said, and she felt compelled to “offer testimony about this kind of suffering, and how it operates sort of systematically, and politically, and historically.” She added, “We live in patriarchy, and any time you offer this kind of testimony, it's out of fashion.”

The 2018 Brett Kavanaugh hearings, in which Christine Blasey Ford accused the Supreme Court nominee of a past assault, brought home society’s seeming indifference to survivors. It was a deeply demoralizing moment, Hood said. Ford wrote in her recent memoir about feeling believed after her testimony; even President Trump said she was credible. “But then people were just like, well, whatever,” Hood said. “Like it just didn't matter.” Donegan praised the introduction of Trauma Plot: A Life, and its focus on the Kavanaugh hearings, as “one of the best critical treatments of the #MeToo survivor story and its place in our popular discourses that I've ever read.” 

The title of Hood’s book references another moment of backlash, in literary criticism and literary circles, following the 2021 publication of a New Yorker article by Parul Sehgal, “The case against the trauma plot.” Hood had some disagreements with the article, she said, but more importantly, she took issue with how language from the article was “weaponized” by others to disparage testimonial literature and art. The piece “created permission for people to put forward anti-feminism under the guise of an aesthetic critique,” she said.

In terms of her own literary approach, Hood initially proposed a complex structure for her book that included criticism and poetry. During the writing process, she pared back, employing different points of view and content sources to maintain focus on the core narrative. In the opening section, a first-person account offers an homage to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Another section switched to third person, which really “opened up” the writing, Hood said, as she had a greater remove in depicting Jamie H. as a character. In a section drawn from earlier journals, Hood decided to address her past self in the second person, as “you,” allowing her to view past choices, including her mistakes, with compassion.

To begin the Clayman Institute event, the author read a passage from late in her book describing a particularly damaging experience. She was drugged and raped by a group of men, an event alluded to earlier in the book and then eventually depicted in detail. Asked by Donegan how it felt to write that section, Hood called it a “very difficult” process that went on for months. She wasn’t sure she was going to write about it or even talk about it in therapy; the event was a “strange ghost in the corner of the room.” In the end, she decided, “Rape happens to bodies, and the physical seemed as important as the emotional or intellectual” in fully telling her story.

Her memories include the men’s laughter, and her wondering what was so funny. She wrote, “Later, I'd think, my God, you stupid bitch. You were the joke.” It’s a jolting echo of Ford’s testimony about her assault: “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the uproarious laughter between the two [men], and their having fun at my expense.”

With Ford’s academic credentials and credibility as a witness, she could almost be seen as the “perfect victim.” That didn’t change much about the outcome of her testimony. In Hood’s case, she wrote openly about her experiences with drug use and multiple sexual partners, a story not aiming to portray perfection. “If I wanted to be a perfect victim, I would have written a different book, and I would have been dishonest,” she said. That “doesn’t mean I deserved to be raped.”

Donegan noted the author’s facility in dodging misogynistic formulas for survivors of the “trauma plot,” which inevitably result in a person whose permanent damage renders them less than whole. Hood described the ways she cares for herself to find healing, through time spent with friends, the comforting presence of her pets, and finding a loving relationship. “Even amid suffering, there’s laughter, joy, pleasure,” she said. Being a credible witness doesn’t mean she has to continually live in trauma. Hood said writing remains important to not only gaining some control over her own account, but also to reclaiming ownership over what comes next in her story.