Content warning: readers are advised this article talks about sexual abuse and child sexual abuse.
As a writer who has experienced the trauma of sexual violence – and who reads and writes about it – Jamie Hood admits to a “soft spot” for Hanya Yanagihara’s divisive 2015 bestseller, A Little Life, often derided as trauma porn. She even describes herself as the “Jude” of “several” of her friend groups, a reference to the novel’s relentlessly abused lead character.
“There’s something in its excess that rang true to me when I first read it,” Hood writes in the introduction to her new book, Trauma Plot: A Life, which mixes memoir and criticism. While Yanagihara’s novel is fiction, for Hood, it understands “it’s possible to spend most of a life reckoning with sexual trauma”.
