What does it mean to tell the story of something that resists language? Trauma Plot is not just a memoir—it is a mutiny against the tidy, linear narratives we expect from survivor stories. Jamie Hood writes with raw lyricism and intellectual fire, unspooling her experiences of sexual violence in recursive, fragmented prose that mirrors the disorientation of trauma itself. From the first page, this book made my chest ache.

Hood begins with the unspeakable: a group assault a month before Trump’s election. Her voice, at first distant and dissociative, slowly fractures into intimacy, rage, sorrow, and clarity. As she shifts from third to first to second person, from diary entries to cultural criticism, we are pulled deeper into a story that refuses to behave. Her obsessions—Philomela, the limits of narrative, the “first-person industrial complex,” the myth of the perfect victim—are interwoven with brutal honesty and searing analysis.

There is no performance of redemption here. No ascension arc. Hood is explicit about her dissociation, shame, disordered eating, her return to sex and drinking despite vows to abstain. And still: the story pulses with life. She chronicles joy with girlfriends, as well as moments of care in therapy. What emerges is not a survival narrative, but something messier and more alive—an insistence on agency, even amid chaos.

Though confessional writing isn’t usually my preferred genre, Trauma Plot left me spellbound. It is unflinching in its pain, but also in its refusal to be sanitized. Jamie Hood refuses to perform palatability for the page, and in doing so, she gives voice to the stories rape culture has demanded remain silent. Her rage, her language, her refusal to tidy the mess—these are acts of resistance. And her insistence on telling the story, again and again and again, in whatever way she can? That is a kind of liberation.

📖 Read this if you love: confessional memoirs that resist narrative closure, feminist literary criticism, radical survivor narratives, and the works of Melissa Febos.

🔑 Key Themes: Sexual Violence and Narrative Fragmentation, The Myth of the Perfect Victim, Rage and Resistance, Confession as Literature, Rape Culture and Silence, Trauma and Memory.