Jamie Hood

You know, I did feel constrained. And what I wanted to do was to, like, fight against that and to sort of challenge myself to not prettify the story in order to fit accepted form. That's Jamie Hood.

You know, I did feel constrained. And what I wanted to do was to, like, fight against that and to sort of challenge myself to not prettify the story in order to fit accepted form. That's Jamie Hood.

You know, I did feel constrained. And what I wanted to do was to, like, fight against that and to sort of challenge myself to not prettify the story in order to fit accepted form. That's Jamie Hood.

How do we loosen the constraints? One way is for people to imagine that the stories don't have to be always super conventional.

How do we loosen the constraints? One way is for people to imagine that the stories don't have to be always super conventional.

How do we loosen the constraints? One way is for people to imagine that the stories don't have to be always super conventional.

There was an article in The New Yorker in 2021 that December. Harold Stuggle had written a piece called The Case Against the Trauma Plot. I remember. Yeah. The idea was sort of that narrative has become bogged down by backstory, by traumatic pasts and histories, and that characters are made sort of flattened or entirely explicable on the basis of some horrible thing that happened to them. Mm-hmm.

There was an article in The New Yorker in 2021 that December. Harold Stuggle had written a piece called The Case Against the Trauma Plot. I remember. Yeah. The idea was sort of that narrative has become bogged down by backstory, by traumatic pasts and histories, and that characters are made sort of flattened or entirely explicable on the basis of some horrible thing that happened to them. Mm-hmm.

There was an article in The New Yorker in 2021 that December. Harold Stuggle had written a piece called The Case Against the Trauma Plot. I remember. Yeah. The idea was sort of that narrative has become bogged down by backstory, by traumatic pasts and histories, and that characters are made sort of flattened or entirely explicable on the basis of some horrible thing that happened to them. Mm-hmm.

You know, I think a lot of critics took up A Little Life as kind of the urtext of this problem.

You know, I think a lot of critics took up A Little Life as kind of the urtext of this problem.

You know, I think a lot of critics took up A Little Life as kind of the urtext of this problem.

Like a lot of people really loved it. It sold well. Everyone was reading it. It was everywhere. It felt as if that was kind of like the bizarre nucleus of this argument among literary critics against traumatic testimony within art. For me, the dispute was not necessarily so much,

Like a lot of people really loved it. It sold well. Everyone was reading it. It was everywhere. It felt as if that was kind of like the bizarre nucleus of this argument among literary critics against traumatic testimony within art. For me, the dispute was not necessarily so much,

Like a lot of people really loved it. It sold well. Everyone was reading it. It was everywhere. It felt as if that was kind of like the bizarre nucleus of this argument among literary critics against traumatic testimony within art. For me, the dispute was not necessarily so much,

with that particular essay, although I had disagreements with it, and more what it seemed to foment among literary critics. In the sort of wake of that essay, there was a kind of a backlash, like an anti-trauma backlash that felt intelligent in some sectors and quite reactionary in others and contrarian. And that felt to me sort of very much part of the ecosystem of the backlash against Me Too.

with that particular essay, although I had disagreements with it, and more what it seemed to foment among literary critics. In the sort of wake of that essay, there was a kind of a backlash, like an anti-trauma backlash that felt intelligent in some sectors and quite reactionary in others and contrarian. And that felt to me sort of very much part of the ecosystem of the backlash against Me Too.

with that particular essay, although I had disagreements with it, and more what it seemed to foment among literary critics. In the sort of wake of that essay, there was a kind of a backlash, like an anti-trauma backlash that felt intelligent in some sectors and quite reactionary in others and contrarian. And that felt to me sort of very much part of the ecosystem of the backlash against Me Too.

I think part of it was I was unable to use that language for a really, really long time. And I think that that's part of how rape culture operates. Like, rape culture creates a scenario in which it's actually quite difficult to define the things that happen to you, right? Like, we sort of rationalize a lot of these things, right?

I think part of it was I was unable to use that language for a really, really long time. And I think that that's part of how rape culture operates. Like, rape culture creates a scenario in which it's actually quite difficult to define the things that happen to you, right? Like, we sort of rationalize a lot of these things, right?