Ivy Rockmore's Reviews > Trauma Plot: A Life

Jamie Hood may well be the great American memoirist. Though, to categorize this masterpiece as a work of genre-memoir might take away from the beauty of its experimentation, its self-referential understanding of what it means to write about trauma while still be taken seriously as a work of literature, especially in a publishing landscape that tokenizes trans authors while profiting off our trauma. I have so much to say about this book, but mainly I sincerely hope that you buy it so that Hood has the ability to write more books. She has novels in her, waiting.

There is something so terrifying yet true about understanding your life in terms of narrative, and Hood is one of the few figures I’ve ever encountered who interrogates her selfhood and constructor of her own narrative as she simultaneously serves as a sort of critic; she knows what she’s doing, and you, the reader, are made sure of it. The structure is masterful, and the experience of reading is perplexing, harrowing, and sickening. This is a proud and essential addition to the canon of (trans) women’s life writing.

This book also changed my philosophies toward sex, especially the failures of narrative in light of Me Too, mainly: the notion of pure victims, impure assaulters; the idea of rape being individual when it is systemic; rape as something held up by structure or “endemic to life under patriarchy”; a reframe, that is rape is about power, yes, but still about sex, in that it reframes the victim’s understanding of their selfhood; desire as a means to reclaim subjectivity; the notion of the trans subject; and how to make a life. The writing is also fucking amazing.

“If you produce this impossible ontology (the Perfect Victim) so no one’s able to embody it, you create the conditions for systemic incredulity, the fiction that sexual violence doesn’t happen, or isn’t serious, that it isn’t endemic to life under patriarchy.”

“In her diaries, the French writer Annie Ernaux remarks that “desire, writing, and death have always been interchangeable” for her, that, in these happenings, the self is ejected from time, evacuated of it, that there, time dissolves.”

“Annie Dillard, who reminds us one plight of the writing life is knowing “your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever.”

“Always I was baffled by the recursivity of this violence. I became convinced it was something to do with a metaphysical fact in me: that I was immanently rapeable. With distance I’m better able to see the system at work—rape culture in the long view, I guess. I’m lately thinking how invisible trans women have been made in the conversation, despite our being at an escalated risk for sexual and other forms of intimate violence. But no one fucking cares, and this is partly because transmisogyny makes us, in a discursive sense, unrapeable. The status quo’s sexual prohibition against trans women means we’re not even understood as fuckable, let alone lovable, and if we can’t be fucked, how could we possibly have been raped? This is the “logic” undergirding the Trumpist disavowal: “She’s not my type.” This banishment of trans women from the horizon of acceptable desire also entails that any sexual experience we do have we must have been desperate for, experiences we not only begged to have, but were granted as an act of fathomless generosity. Men I used to sleep with would talk about me being “lucky” to have gotten it from them, which is a rationale at the heart of all rape culture: that women must be grateful for whatever cock we get. Like cock is so fucking great. Sometimes, sure, but the bedrock of transmisogyny is the claim that we aren’t reliable narrators of our own existence, that we’re sexually confused at best, and insidious fabricators at worst. Ontological deceivers. Phobic presumptions about the inauthenticity of our identity become mapped onto everything we say and do in the world—this notion that we aren’t who we say we are renders all aspects of our self-accounting dishonest. Add to this the current sex panic, which paints anyone who’s not cis and straight as a moral pollutant, a trickster, a violator. Trans women are receptacles for so much of our culture’s erotic terror. We’re fundamentally monstrous: body horror made manifest; cobbled-together doll parts. It’s total dehumanization. And when you dehumanize the other, you can justify any violence you enact against them.”