How to Write a Post–Me Too Memoir

Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Ian Stearns

Jamie Hood’s new book, Trauma Plot, flips the confessional memoir on its head. In her piercing account of learning to live in a world defined by sexual violence, Hood weaves her personal story with analysis of the way the “rape survivor” has been flattened into a cultural archetype: a tragic woman doomed to carry the weight of society’s ills. Moving through decades of her own experience, Hood relocates from Boston to New York but can’t outrun the ghosts of her past.