Jamie Hood

Like, I'm a person. Like, I'm a whole person. Isn't that crazy? You know, because I had never really understood that before. Yeah. And to be able to say, like, you know, maybe one meaning I'm going to make is to put a book out that's going to make other people feel less alone. Maybe that's one meaning of my life.

Another meaning would be that, like, I could be loved and I could love others, you know. And these are meanings that I'm, like, learning to make and that I hadn't really been able to conceptualize before. I'm sorry. I'm tearing up.

It's okay. I noticed. I'm sorry for making you cry. No, no, no. It's all right.

I'm just really receiving what you're saying. It's okay.

Well, I mean, I hope I'm kind of doing it. I don't know. I mean, it's a funny question because this book was not an easy sell. There's a very recognizable narrative arc for a lot of those memoirs, and there are many that I have read and loved. But there's an idea. It's like I'm sort of I'm living my usual life. And then this horrible thing happens to me and it takes me to this awful place.

But then I get better. Right. Like that's kind of the arc. And that's the that is how narrative often operates. Right. Like there's a conflict and then a resolution of the conflict after backstory happens. And, 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, I guess.

You know, even something like the first chapter, which is in the third person where I sort of write about myself as a character, Jamie H. You know, that's something that I think was very unorthodox because the rape memoir is supposed to kind of be like victim testimony. Yeah. in a way. You know what I mean?

And the fact that I wanted to do this formal play, I think, was very unusual and made it kind of difficult to say to a publisher, like, this is worth publishing. How do we loosen the constraints? One way is for people to imagine that the stories don't have to be always super conventional. Like,

One thing about the case against the trauma plot, that essay in The New Yorker, one example that she uses of like a good trauma plot is something like Michaela Cole's I May Destroy You.

Right. It's a good show. I agree. And like it does feel very experimental and fragmentary and like it attempts to tell the story in a different way. Yeah. The answer is difficult to come to because I think what it requires is that people sort of put themselves –

out like and and take risks yeah i don't know i guess the answer is like go right weird well jamie i really enjoyed our conversation thank you so much for coming on and talking about your book yeah thank you so much for having me that was author jamie hood her book trauma plot is out now

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.

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.

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?

We say, like, I was drunk or maybe it wasn't that bad or maybe I misunderstood what was happening. And I think because of the shame around having endured sexual violence, you end up sort of hemming and hawing about the kind of language that you use about it, right?

And so for me, you know, particularly because I was not a model victim, you know, like I just wasn't. And that I think I had to make peace with that in order to get to a place where I was able to understand that what had happened to me was bad and was wrong and I didn't deserve it, you know? And so like coming to language,

Like being able to narrativize the experiences that I went through and specifically being able to say like what happened to me was rape, you know, unequivocally. That was like one of the biggest hurdles to cross. Being able to put a name to it unlocked something for me.

And, you know, when I started reading from the book or like reading early iterations of it like years ago, people would come up to me and say like they had never thought about their experiences in that way before. And like that was something that felt so beautiful and like was one of the reasons why it felt important to actually write this book.

Because for many, many years I thought I was just sort of writing and I didn't think I was going to publish it. Right. But I think seeing responses from audiences, you know, when I was like performing it, it made me feel like actually I was doing something important that wasn't only about naming my own experience, but that was opening a space for other people to find a language for theirs as well.

Yeah, I mean, I think this is another thing that I struggled with for a long time, which is like a feeling of exceptionalism. And it's funny to use that word because I think we tend to imagine it as having like a positive connotation. But actually, what I felt was that I was singular somehow in like the suffering that I had endured. And that was part of the reason I felt so ashamed of it.

You know, I was like, because I had never really heard people talk about these things before. And I don't know if that's just my upbringing or like the circles that I moved through, but I didn't really feel like there were other people who were sharing those experiences.

And so I kind of thought, you know, it consolidated that feeling that I had somehow earned it or that I was just the sort of person who was going to keep getting raped, you know. So that sense of singularity or exceptionalism was part of what kept me silent in a way because I thought that, you know, these weren't experiences that would be recognizable to anyone else or sympathetic to anyone else.

Rationally speaking, it's not like I thought I was the only person who had ever been raped.

Like, of course I didn't think that. But, like, I didn't know, like, what a bedrock it was and how many people... would find something that seemed recognizable. You know, that is one of the successes of Me Too.

If we're looking for successes in Me Too, I think one of the things that happened was that it made it quite apparent how enduring, how longstanding, and how overwhelmingly present sexual violence is in our culture.

I mean, I think that the way that we talk about it tends to operate around the idea of anomalousness, like it's an anomaly in someone's regular life as opposed to sort of an everyday occurrence or an everyday experience. With Me Too, I think that the narratives tended to orient towards monsters and angels, right? Like our big Me Too story is like Harvey Weinstein.

Or like Epstein, who becomes this like larger than life. There's all this sort of, you know, dark glamour around it, frankly, where it's like billionaires on private jets who are like flying people out to this secret island for like their rape cabal. Allegedly.

And I think that a lot of the narratives calibrate around those things because they're easy to understand. And now we can lock them up and we've gotten rid of the problem. Like it enables the way of thinking that you don't look at it as the status quo. You don't think about it as a sort of structural problem, sort of implicit to our sex, like our relations between men and women.

And I think like recognizing the ordinariness requires that we kind of have to like radically restructure everything about our sexual politics, our sexual experience.

It's a question I raise in the book that I still feel like I struggle with a lot. You know, someone like the French novelist Virginie Despont writes about this kind of in the context of sex work. And she's like, you know, sex workers are always having to account for ourselves. We... have sex work narratives, but you rarely have testimony from Johns, right?

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.

Like, clients aren't running around saying, like, I pay for sex and here's why I do it. But, you know, sex workers are constantly asked to, you know, justify why they do the work, what that work looks like, etc., And so I was sort of, I guess, extrapolating from there where the idea is that the story of rape also has to sort of emerge from the person who has been raped.

And like the entire onus of testimony is on that person. And it does feel like an imbalance. But, you know, I think the thing that I struggled with that I write about is like, well, do we really need to be platforming rapists at this particular political moment? It feels weird.

quite frightening to be at the dawn of this administration and to see the ways in which someone like Nick Fuentes saying, your body, my choice, like this is something that is very bald. It feels unfair to demand that victims constantly account for ourselves and constantly offer our stories to the world.

There is something that can, I think, be quite dangerous about that, that we're under this responsibility to offer, say, the worst things that happened to us up to the world for scrutiny. I don't know what the solution is. I dream of rehabilitative justice, but I don't exactly always know what that looks like in practice.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I think like a more honest and deeper and more rigorous conversation about the systemic indoctrination of people into sexual violence feels like certainly like one of the pathways toward rectifying, I guess, the imbalance. Yeah, I think that's a really smart point. I think, you know, suggesting that we understand it in a structural way and again, not as simply individual stories.

I do find rape to be like functionally meaningless. I think that the meaning that I attempted to make out of the book was to find other things about my life that were worth living. Stick around.

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

I don't think that I do find rape to be like functionally meaningless. And the book is a long project in sort of intellectualizing or articulating or contextualizing how sexual violence operates sort of systemically, but also in relation to like my personal experiences with it. But in terms of like the event of being raped, right, like that is a violation that degrades the body.

It degrades the person to the point of like becoming inhuman. And my personal experience Sense of it and how I experienced it. Like I say in the quote, you know, like it taught me to think of myself as meat, right? The thing that I wanted to figure out was, like, how do I make meaning beyond that?

Because I think that I allowed the meaninglessness of having been raped to contaminate the rest of my life. And to feel as if your personhood is not valuable, you know, to feel that you are inhuman, that you are exactly as rotted as, like, the event of being raped made you feel. I think that I did feel that my life was meaningless. I thought that I...

was going to keep getting raped because this was, you know, like I was victimized several times by discontinuous assailants. And, you know, the sort of recursivity of that made me feel that that was the purpose of my life in some important way, which was very difficult. What I wanted to do was to have a life beyond the trauma, you know, and that's, I think, maybe like the sort of

where I do feel cliche or conventional. You know, like, I think that I was very resistant to the conventional trauma memoir arc. But there is something that felt very healing about it, about writing the book, about coming to terms with these experiences, about being in therapy over them. You know, like, I was able to say, like, oh, actually, like, I have so much to offer the world.