A Vogue and Vulture Most Anticipated Book of the Year
"There’s nothing remotely easy about this book . . . but the tale that Hood tells dives deep and is richly layered and worth reading . . . . Hood has been vulnerable and she has been strong, and it’s the strong Hood who emerges victorious from Trauma Plot. You’ll be rooting for her through every page of this searing memoir."
—Vogue
"Jamie Hood is not only an uncommon thinker, but a world-class explorer of unthought. She 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
“A defense, without being defensive, of life writing and of writing through trauma . . . Trauma Plot is a sophisticated kind of life writing, and does something far more interesting than claim authenticity through the immediacy of experience . . . . There’s a directness to Hood’s sentences. They cut to the matter.”
—McKenzie Wark, e-flux
"This book devastated me. I found my whole being thrumming with the energy of Hood's refusals, her intense thinking and feeling, the formal play with the modernist novel, and her clear-eyed reporting in the wake of trauma. An American Annie Ernaux, Hood writes to avenge her people—with incendiary brilliance, wit, pain, and devotion to the search for something like truth."
—Kate Zambreno, author of Heroines
"Trauma Plot is an ode to the wrecked woman, the bloody battle of survivorship, and the act of writing itself—not because writing can save us, but because it reminds us we're still alive."
—Melissa Lozada-Oliva, author of Dreaming of You and Candelaria
"Bold and layered."
—The Millions
"With bracing detail, a practiced poetic consciousness, and something like foreboding mysticism, [Hood] excavates the layers of both her personal experience and what it reflects about sexualized violence against women generally and transwomen in particular . . . . Here, the artistic intentionality of Hood’s narration meets the genius of her project . . . . A magnificent, norm-shattering work."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
"Brilliant . . . with piercing intellect and lyrical prose, Hood redraws the boundaries of the tell-all memoir. It’s a rare feat of storytelling."
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
"Hood's writing is strong, elegant, and precise . . . profoundly powerful and compelling . . . . [She] is simultaneously a lyrical poet who uses language in unexpected ways and an unflinchingly honest, keen observer of base ugliness."
—Booklist
