Trauma Plot by Jamie Hood

Trauma Plot is Jamie Hood’s memoir of being raped three different times as an adult. I was reading this book when

Naomi Kanakia

posted about it and asked readers to disagree with her assessment. She thought Hood’s trauma seemed meaningless, both in real life and even after Hood’s attempts, in therapy and in writing, to make meaning from it. Kanakia says:

The book defends the telling of these stories, but it's unable to say why telling these stories is important. The book can only say that because trauma victims find it to be necessary to say these things, then these things must be said.

I don't know. I've read memoirs of many kinds of traumas, but almost always they're stories about some kind of escape or redemption. With The Trauma Plot, the escape felt so empty, so provisional, that it really seemed like it evacuated the trauma plot and ended up proving the point it set out to argue against—this author was so haunted by these events that she was trapped forever, circling within them, until she could publish a book about them. And the implications seems to be that if bad things happen to you, then…you're just stuck. You're marked forever by what's happened to you, and there's no escape. Which might be true, but it's quite depressing.

Perhaps this is just my perspective, but I've come to realize that unadorned truth isn't necessarily a worthwhile artistic effect. Ultimately, it's quite easy to make the world seem bleak and hopeless. What's difficult is to make the world explain itself somehow.

I agree with Kanakia that Hood’s escape seems provisional—she is writing from a moment where she is taking fewer risks than she used to and therefore feels somewhat less vulnerable, and where she also feels like she wants to live, which wasn’t true before. These are important but delicate changes, and I didn’t feel as I was reading that they were irreversible.

But I experienced an arc in the story that may or may not have been the arc Hood was actually trying to construct. As she moved forward in time, she also gave us a more complete picture of her adult life, and glimpses of her childhood, which was marked by domestic violence, the predatory behavior of men she met on the internet, and the shameful failures of adults who could have protected her. Hood said that people who have been sexually abused as children are more likely to be raped as adults. She has to deal with this idea of herself throughout the book as rapeable. She even settles on the phrase “rape girl” at the end, and includes other rape girls in her acknowledgments.

And I did feel that connecting her adult experiences to her childhood experiences was a form of meaning-making. It wasn’t one that made the violence in her life seem less random and meaningless, but rather one that took the violence out of her singular, individual experience.

I read the book at a time when I was also taking a training, as part of a volunteer role I’m taking on, on preventing child sex abuse. And the experts interviewed in one of the training videos made the same point—that when children are victims of sex abuse, it has terrible long-term effects on their adult lives, and that this is a public health issue.

If rape is a societal phenomenon, the thing Hood calls (after Rebecca Solnit) “the longest war,” it’s one where we can talk about how our failure to protect children and young people has consequences for their adult lives in the same way as poor nutrition or a lack of early literacy education. And letting it happen on a large scale, which we do, is not just a personal tragedy, but a squandering of human capital. Hood’s memoir puts a human face on that abstract idea, telling a story about what that looks like in the life of an actual person—a person who closely and tenderly observes the people around her, a smart person who loves learning and thinking, an ambitious person, a person who loves her family.

Yes, her book is absolutely depressing. And I would not make a blanket recommendation that people read it. But Hood’s book came along at the right time for me to reinforce an idea that I’d recently had reason to think about, thereby making it much more memorable and keeping it from slipping back into the stream of ideas. Because of this book, I will be more likely to keep thinking about it, and when I do, I will be thinking about a specific person who I’ve come to care about.