This is about a black, Latinx woman’s experiences—named Vivian—steeped in verisimilitude, negotiating her job, friends, love life, and general life in The Big City as a single person. A granular breakdown of her interiority to build a necessarily solipsistic model of how she perceives and processes the world as a product of a traumatic upbringing she has yet to reckon with.

Often, interactions are encroachments, hierarchal, competitive, and charged. These become a kind of litmus test or a gauge as to how she’s doing mentally. Telegraphing her coping mechanisms and responses. Some healthy, others not. You witness how demanding her processes are. Mentally, physically, sociologically. Some of it—most of it, I’d say—by virtue of living in a white dominant, patriarchal space, feels like a healthy defence system that has molded her into a form of black excellence. Which becomes another intricacy to be negotiated. Some reactions, though, are patterns she doesn’t know about nor feel considered or reason, even as you get a deceptively motivated thinking extraction of why she is doing and saying what she is.

It’s really effective, though has a slow start, and takes a while to sink into the style and what the book is actually doing. This is actually what I expected/wanted from Brown’s Assembly. Whereas Assembly was so short as to reduce everything to caricature and rob much of the humanity of all participants to display the micro aggressions and racism while being in a white space, operating at a high level—Post-Traumatic is the opposite. Showing the internalized misogyny and beauty standards and messy details not just for Vivian, but rendering all characters, most of whom are women, in a stark and realistic light that then segues into how the minutiae and interactions translate into the major themes of the book.

I think it’s far more successful. Prose wise, it’s contemporary to the point of feeling like specificity and acute diction would almost detract from a kind of testimony-like quality the book is imbued with. There’s no bombastic lines or showing off. It’s the everyday displayed as a series of tiny cuts; some of them dealt by Vivian herself, knowingly or otherwise. When you sink into the deceptively rich world, often characterized as it’s been rendered for full context, it morphs from a exhausting play-by-play of Vivian assessing every character, to a rich and vivacious, sometimes sad, reality realistically, empathetically drawn.