Jamie Hood On Trauma Plot With Kate Zambreno

Join us at Book Culture 112th on Tuesday, April 1st at 6:30pm for a reading and conversation to celebrate the release of Trauma Plot by Jamie Hood. She will be joined by Kate Zambreno, author of Tones and Heroines. About Trauma Plot: From a rising literary star and the author of how to be a good girl comes a brilliant, biting, and beautifully wrought memoir of trauma and the cost of survival. “Hood descends into the terrifying dark of the unsayable with the dimmest of flashlights and returns bearing verbal gems, treasures, and marvels. Trauma Plot is a glass case of such wonders.”—Torrey Peters, bestselling author of Detransition, Baby 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 Plot, 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 Plot 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. Jamie Hood is the author of how to be a good girl, one of Vogue’s Best Books of 2020, and regards, marcel, a monthly newsletter on Proust and other miscellany. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Baffler, Bookforum, The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, The Drift, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn. Kate Zambreno is the author most recently of The Light Room (to be published in paperback in Fall 2025 by Transit Books) as well as Tone, a collaborative study with Sofia Samatar (Columbia University). Their manifesto, Heroines, was recently reissued by Semiotext(e), with an introduction by Jamie Hood. A collection on zoos and Kafkas, Animal Stories, is also forthcoming in Fall 2025 from Transit Books' Undelivered Lecture series. They are at work on a series, "Realisms," circling around precarity, apartments and desire (beginning with Foam and Performance Art, to be published by Semiotext(e) in November 2025 and May 2026.). They currently teach in the graduate writing program at Columbia University and are in the Ph.D. program in Performance Studies at NYU. Event address: Book Culture536 W 112th St.New York, NY 10025 More Info below.