Trauma Description A Life

"Hood descends into the terrifying dark of the unsayable with the dimmest of flashlights and returns bearing verbal gems, treasures, and marvels. Trauma Description is a glass case of such wonders."-Torrey Peters, bestselling author of Detransition, Baby and Stag Dance
In the thick of lockdown, 2020, poet, critic, and memoirist Jamie Hood published her debut, how to be a good girl, an interrogation of modern femininity and the narratives of love, desire, and violence yoked to it. The Rumpus praised Hood's "bold vulnerability," and Vogue named it a Best Book of 2020.
In Trauma Description, Hood draws on disparate literary forms to tell the story that lurked in good girl's margins-of three decades marred by sexual violence and the wreckage left behind. With her trademark critical remove, Hood interrogates the archetype of the rape survivor, who must perform penitence long after living through the unthinkable, invoking some of art's most infamous women to have played the role: Ovid's Philomela, David Lynch's Laura Palmer, and Artemisia Gentileschi, who captured Judith's wrath. In so doing, she asks: What do we as a culture demand of survivors? And what do survivors, in turn, owe a world that has abandoned them?
Trauma Description is a scalding work of personal and literary criticism. It is a send-up of our culture's pious disdain for "trauma porn," a dirge for the broken promises of #MeToo, and a paean to finding life after death.