One of the hot books of 2014 was a novel by Jenny Offill called Dept of Speculation. This was one of those wikipedia realism books that interspersed little factoids (in Offill’s book the facts were usually about animals or science) with short, descriptive passages about the life of the unnamed writer-protagonist—a mother who felt somewhat stifled and frustrated.
I’m curious about your comment that you doubt the value of telling the unadorned truth.
If (the conditional here is super important to me) we live in a world where the truth is that traumas break people without leading to anything good, or to anything more meaningful than their drawn out suffering, would you then assert that such truth should be passed over in silence? Should they be covered over with myths? What sort of things would be worth writing about in such a world?
It's easy to leave this comment, but are you gonna read this book?
Not to be too tough on you, but I am not talking about what people _should_ write. Obviously they have to write whatever they feel compelled to write. I am talking about what's valuable for the reader. Most people already know that life is full of misfortune and suffering. If it truly can't be better, and if the suffering really has no meaning, then why read about it?
I think that there can be artistic value in all experiences. I remember reading Shulamith Firestone's Airless Spaces and being profoundly disturbed by the author's descent into severe mental illness, but I wouldn't say that the book doesn't have artistic value just because it's a depiction of suffering without end. I might not want to re-read it because the emotions it evoked were so difficult, but that doesn't mean it was poorly done. Sadly, maybe it's a question of talent--if you're not Shulamith Firestone, it's harder to craft suffering without purpose into something that others are willing to witness.
(Also, thank you for this essay as I'm writing about some much more popular and much less brutally traumatic material and it's very much helped me to get a handle on the basics of the trauma plot, femininity, etc.!)
I do tend to think that authors who publish have a duty to try to write things that will be beneficial or at least not harmful for the reader rather than just what the author cares about. (Which is why my instinct is to collapse the what is worth writing/what is worth reading distinction for published writing)
I think a lot of people believe that suffering necessarily leads to growth. sometimes this is explained as suffering being a part of a Devine plan, sometimes it’s the vague “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” thing. It’s easy to get into a mental state where you are oscillating between telling yourself that everything is for the best and also losing hope in this belief, creating a lot of pain and cognitive dissonance.
One answer to why the reader should read such books would be that, if the world really is bleak, it would be better to face that fully and by reflecting on it find a way to reconcile oneself to it.
I’ve created a graphic memoir about my experience of being diagnosed with breast cancer aged 37 (I’m 40 now and recovered, but this was traumatic for sure). My book will be published later this year.
I used to disagree with the idea that you have to suffer to create art. Then I suffered, and created the best art I ever have.
I still disagree with the idea that suffering is essential to art. How do I square that with my own work? I think it’s because I made decisions and creative choices. It’s a story that’s truthful, but it’s a story. I processed my trauma through therapy. Not in the pages of my book. I needed a little distance from my story to tell it well - but not too much, because I also wanted that rawness and urgency.
It’s a fine balance between “authenticity” and “creativity”. Memoirs are stories, just like any other story. You still have to think about the reader. If you want people to buy it and read it.
I think I shy away from trauma plots where it feels like the author is just recounting miserable experience after miserable experience with no light at the end of the tunnel, or if it feels like the trauma is there for shock value. But literary trauma that's carefully treated and deconstructed can be much more meaningful to me than other works. There's a balance to be struck between naively romanticizing trauma and writing glorified grimdark. You're right that the raw trauma life throws at you isn't often artistically valuable. But the best authors will take that raw material and glue or reforge it into something that's particularly meaningful to them in the process of recounting it on the page. And the reforged, reinterpreted substance is what I'm interested in.
Interesting review! I've become very interested in understanding what makes some writing feel like a "trauma dump" (as the kids call it) vs. a metabolization of that trauma into something else. I'm also interested in that point of defensive writing: when is calling out possible critiques a demonstration of self-awareness and rigour as a writer and when is it just plain defensiveness to the point it feels that the writer doesn't really trust what they wrote in the first place?
This is my next book on my TBR, looking forward to reading it and seeing how it lands!
Good question. I think it varies from reader to reader. Even within a reader, it can change from read to read.
When I read retellings of traumatic experiences, I ask two things: "What does the writer want me to carry from this experience?" and "Are they asking me to do more work than what they did in the writing?"
Sometimes, they want the reader to carry the "unadorned truth" of their experience and write that retelling on the page. That's fine, but sometimes that unadorned truth becomes too much for me to hold. In those cases when the only thing being asked of me as a reader is to "take it" and I am not in a position to do that, it feels more like a "dump" than a metabolization.
This isn't to say that the retelling of traumatic experiences is not worthy of writing. For some pieces and some parts of pieces, I want to and should "take it." But sometimes, it feels like I'm being asked to do more work than the writer, and sometimes, I don't like feeling that way.
I do get your point but want to put in a plug for Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill (no, I don't know her, and I loved the book.
I read this novel in one sitting, during the night: It's oddly structured and that is part of its charm. Our narrator is a writer, trying to finish a novel, working with a would-be astronaut/writer to co-write or help write his views of the world, including the astrophysicist Carl Sagan—and ultimately Sagan's marriage becomes part of the mix—as marriage is the focus of this journey. Our narrator marries, lives in Brooklyn, has bedbugs, has a child and struggles through the process of it all with digressions that compel: quotes from Rilke, what the Buddhists say, what Fitzgerald once advised and many more dropped in like random thoughts that somehow add up, as the conundrum of her life unfolds and indeed unravels. What is startling about this original writing is that it reads like a memoir or "auto-fiction." And that in itself is a reason to read it.
I have written an essay on how fiction that reveals, meaning is ultimately self-revelatory shoots for the moon and gives us moving emotional truths. This is true of Harriet Doer's novel _Stones for Ibarra_. Do you think that's a trauma novel, too? Or do you make an exception for her story?
But. Taking your word for it, it sounds like the book doesn't acknowledge that we can get something out of sharing trauma even if it doesn't cure us completely of the pathology it caused. Coping isn't curing, but it isn't nothing either.
I related to this line from you: "Every possible criticism of this book is brought to the surface, but the effect is only to cement those criticisms in the reader’s mind." It reminded me of 'Deadpool & Wolverine.' Acknowledging that the MCU sucks didn't save that movie for the same reason. To do that, you have to move past the critique and into a reminder of the value of the project (sharing trauma, superhero franchises, etc.) itself--even if that project is not completable.
There’s a parallel here to Holocaust literature I think. Primo Levi certainly seemed to both feel the need to bear witness, and skepticism about bearing witness.
It’s also a feature of life changing trauma that one can feel obsessed with something that happened and also heartily sick of thinking, talking, and writing about it.
There is value in howling into the void. Realism is our last great transgression.
From what you've described, my only complaint is that the writer's book is too easily put into the Trauma Book Section. Given the rate of projected assault, this is standard Human Experience and it's everyone's problem. If you haven't been assaulted, you know someone who has. Maybe you know a rapist. The possibilities are endless. It's not just a niche feminist, self indulgent trauma problem: men are assaulted too and the often clueless loved ones of the abused flail in their support.
Thank you for this thoughtful review. It got me thinking about what’s working for me so well about Trauma Plot. I’m stuck on this part of your review — “this author was so haunted by these events that she was trapped forever, circling within them, until she could publish a book about them.” I think the point of this book is to trace the path of trauma until it becomes clear that its shape is a circle. In this way, this book is social critique in memoir drag, since good social critique (in the tradition of Foucault) doesn’t prescribe solutions, but rather focuses on putting into relief the specificity of the problem. Of course, yes — like you said, depressing. But it’s kind of hopeful through omission, since to include a solution would inevitably introduce a new problem.
I’ve read this and really enjoyed it! FWIW I don’t think non-trans readers won’t find this book. I’m cis and Trauma Plot has come out to much excitement in the mostly cis New York book world. I went to a party recently where no fewer than three people had copies on them.
I found it extremely truthful. I understood it as more of a kunstlerroman disguised as a trauma plot. The artist finds a way to work in her chosen medium by reconciling herself to the essential construct of a received mode or narrative (e.g. the confessional genre, the trauma plot).
It’s something I think about a lot, the potential to deaden a real experience in the act of making it into art. And for what? To whom?
Many popular writers like Colleen Hoover succeed because they take awful experiences that a lot of (mostly women) readers have had, like domestic violence, and smelt & hammer them down into redemption stories. That’s fine for her, but writers like Hood cannot live with that denial of ambivalence and hastily ascribed meaning. I think it’s really beautiful to explore that hesitation in the act of artistic utterance.
Without having read this particular book, it’s hard to comment, but I do think there is some power in recognising hard experiences ARE hard, without needing to give them redemption arcs, necessarily. That can be validating for those who have experienced similar. In general we cannot anticipate what is valuable to readers, and the process of survival is innately interesting to people, I think. Your essay made me think about Woolf’s reflections on writing about ‘shocks’ in her life in ‘Sketch of the Past’, she seemed to find meaning in transforming experience though not everyone may feel the same.
I suppose the thing is that only a small section of readers care about the debate on whether the trauma plot is worthwhile or not. Whereas many, many readers can be drawn into a story about a struggle to survive, whatever the threat to survival is, whatever survival means in context, and whether survival is achieved or is worthwhile or not. It's a very compelling plot. We are never going to get bored of trauma and its effect on a figure that is fully realised for the reader, whether that figure is fictional or not. But again, debate about how much meaning trauma has runs dry of meaning quite quickly. I guess some people who have experienced trauma want to feel fancy and metafictional and to hear that would make them feel that they're not allowed to eat lunch with the smart kids. That's very understandable but understanding it doesn't circumvent the limitations of the smart kids.
I have not read this book and can’t pretend to comment on the toll of undergoing these experiences.
I think the stance here described is a frustratingly common one for people with much lighter loads to carry. I’m starting to feel a bit like people really need to go back and read the existentialists because we all seem to be working ourselves into a corner of having no control because we believe we have no control.
I’ve been reflecting on the experience of going in and out of depression over the course of my life, as well as all the reflecting and reflecting everyone like me is doing without ever getting to a conclusion or acting. Idk man.
I'm reading Trauma Plot now. Thank you for thinking through your reaction in this thoughtful, hesitant post. I liked hearing you be a little bit unsure. I especially liked this: "I've come to realize that unadorned truth isn't necessarily a worthwhile artistic effect."
I’m curious about your comment that you doubt the value of telling the unadorned truth.
If (the conditional here is super important to me) we live in a world where the truth is that traumas break people without leading to anything good, or to anything more meaningful than their drawn out suffering, would you then assert that such truth should be passed over in silence? Should they be covered over with myths? What sort of things would be worth writing about in such a world?
It's easy to leave this comment, but are you gonna read this book?
Not to be too tough on you, but I am not talking about what people _should_ write. Obviously they have to write whatever they feel compelled to write. I am talking about what's valuable for the reader. Most people already know that life is full of misfortune and suffering. If it truly can't be better, and if the suffering really has no meaning, then why read about it?
I think that there can be artistic value in all experiences. I remember reading Shulamith Firestone's Airless Spaces and being profoundly disturbed by the author's descent into severe mental illness, but I wouldn't say that the book doesn't have artistic value just because it's a depiction of suffering without end. I might not want to re-read it because the emotions it evoked were so difficult, but that doesn't mean it was poorly done. Sadly, maybe it's a question of talent--if you're not Shulamith Firestone, it's harder to craft suffering without purpose into something that others are willing to witness.
(Also, thank you for this essay as I'm writing about some much more popular and much less brutally traumatic material and it's very much helped me to get a handle on the basics of the trauma plot, femininity, etc.!)
I’m highly unlikely to read this particular book.
I do tend to think that authors who publish have a duty to try to write things that will be beneficial or at least not harmful for the reader rather than just what the author cares about. (Which is why my instinct is to collapse the what is worth writing/what is worth reading distinction for published writing)
I think a lot of people believe that suffering necessarily leads to growth. sometimes this is explained as suffering being a part of a Devine plan, sometimes it’s the vague “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” thing. It’s easy to get into a mental state where you are oscillating between telling yourself that everything is for the best and also losing hope in this belief, creating a lot of pain and cognitive dissonance.
One answer to why the reader should read such books would be that, if the world really is bleak, it would be better to face that fully and by reflecting on it find a way to reconcile oneself to it.
I’ve created a graphic memoir about my experience of being diagnosed with breast cancer aged 37 (I’m 40 now and recovered, but this was traumatic for sure). My book will be published later this year.
I used to disagree with the idea that you have to suffer to create art. Then I suffered, and created the best art I ever have.
I still disagree with the idea that suffering is essential to art. How do I square that with my own work? I think it’s because I made decisions and creative choices. It’s a story that’s truthful, but it’s a story. I processed my trauma through therapy. Not in the pages of my book. I needed a little distance from my story to tell it well - but not too much, because I also wanted that rawness and urgency.
It’s a fine balance between “authenticity” and “creativity”. Memoirs are stories, just like any other story. You still have to think about the reader. If you want people to buy it and read it.
I think I shy away from trauma plots where it feels like the author is just recounting miserable experience after miserable experience with no light at the end of the tunnel, or if it feels like the trauma is there for shock value. But literary trauma that's carefully treated and deconstructed can be much more meaningful to me than other works. There's a balance to be struck between naively romanticizing trauma and writing glorified grimdark. You're right that the raw trauma life throws at you isn't often artistically valuable. But the best authors will take that raw material and glue or reforge it into something that's particularly meaningful to them in the process of recounting it on the page. And the reforged, reinterpreted substance is what I'm interested in.
Interesting review! I've become very interested in understanding what makes some writing feel like a "trauma dump" (as the kids call it) vs. a metabolization of that trauma into something else. I'm also interested in that point of defensive writing: when is calling out possible critiques a demonstration of self-awareness and rigour as a writer and when is it just plain defensiveness to the point it feels that the writer doesn't really trust what they wrote in the first place?
This is my next book on my TBR, looking forward to reading it and seeing how it lands!
What do you think makes some writing feel metabolized and some feel like a dump?
Good question. I think it varies from reader to reader. Even within a reader, it can change from read to read.
When I read retellings of traumatic experiences, I ask two things: "What does the writer want me to carry from this experience?" and "Are they asking me to do more work than what they did in the writing?"
Sometimes, they want the reader to carry the "unadorned truth" of their experience and write that retelling on the page. That's fine, but sometimes that unadorned truth becomes too much for me to hold. In those cases when the only thing being asked of me as a reader is to "take it" and I am not in a position to do that, it feels more like a "dump" than a metabolization.
This isn't to say that the retelling of traumatic experiences is not worthy of writing. For some pieces and some parts of pieces, I want to and should "take it." But sometimes, it feels like I'm being asked to do more work than the writer, and sometimes, I don't like feeling that way.
I do get your point but want to put in a plug for Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill (no, I don't know her, and I loved the book.
I read this novel in one sitting, during the night: It's oddly structured and that is part of its charm. Our narrator is a writer, trying to finish a novel, working with a would-be astronaut/writer to co-write or help write his views of the world, including the astrophysicist Carl Sagan—and ultimately Sagan's marriage becomes part of the mix—as marriage is the focus of this journey. Our narrator marries, lives in Brooklyn, has bedbugs, has a child and struggles through the process of it all with digressions that compel: quotes from Rilke, what the Buddhists say, what Fitzgerald once advised and many more dropped in like random thoughts that somehow add up, as the conundrum of her life unfolds and indeed unravels. What is startling about this original writing is that it reads like a memoir or "auto-fiction." And that in itself is a reason to read it.
I have written an essay on how fiction that reveals, meaning is ultimately self-revelatory shoots for the moon and gives us moving emotional truths. This is true of Harriet Doer's novel _Stones for Ibarra_. Do you think that's a trauma novel, too? Or do you make an exception for her story?
Anyway, I introduce that book and discuss "Autobiography and Fiction" here: https://marytabor.substack.com/p/autobiography-and-fiction-get-ready
Preface: I have not read this book.
But. Taking your word for it, it sounds like the book doesn't acknowledge that we can get something out of sharing trauma even if it doesn't cure us completely of the pathology it caused. Coping isn't curing, but it isn't nothing either.
I related to this line from you: "Every possible criticism of this book is brought to the surface, but the effect is only to cement those criticisms in the reader’s mind." It reminded me of 'Deadpool & Wolverine.' Acknowledging that the MCU sucks didn't save that movie for the same reason. To do that, you have to move past the critique and into a reminder of the value of the project (sharing trauma, superhero franchises, etc.) itself--even if that project is not completable.
There’s a parallel here to Holocaust literature I think. Primo Levi certainly seemed to both feel the need to bear witness, and skepticism about bearing witness.
It’s also a feature of life changing trauma that one can feel obsessed with something that happened and also heartily sick of thinking, talking, and writing about it.
I haven't read this book, but I might now.
There is value in howling into the void. Realism is our last great transgression.
From what you've described, my only complaint is that the writer's book is too easily put into the Trauma Book Section. Given the rate of projected assault, this is standard Human Experience and it's everyone's problem. If you haven't been assaulted, you know someone who has. Maybe you know a rapist. The possibilities are endless. It's not just a niche feminist, self indulgent trauma problem: men are assaulted too and the often clueless loved ones of the abused flail in their support.
Thank you for this thoughtful review. It got me thinking about what’s working for me so well about Trauma Plot. I’m stuck on this part of your review — “this author was so haunted by these events that she was trapped forever, circling within them, until she could publish a book about them.” I think the point of this book is to trace the path of trauma until it becomes clear that its shape is a circle. In this way, this book is social critique in memoir drag, since good social critique (in the tradition of Foucault) doesn’t prescribe solutions, but rather focuses on putting into relief the specificity of the problem. Of course, yes — like you said, depressing. But it’s kind of hopeful through omission, since to include a solution would inevitably introduce a new problem.
I’ve read this and really enjoyed it! FWIW I don’t think non-trans readers won’t find this book. I’m cis and Trauma Plot has come out to much excitement in the mostly cis New York book world. I went to a party recently where no fewer than three people had copies on them.
I found it extremely truthful. I understood it as more of a kunstlerroman disguised as a trauma plot. The artist finds a way to work in her chosen medium by reconciling herself to the essential construct of a received mode or narrative (e.g. the confessional genre, the trauma plot).
It’s something I think about a lot, the potential to deaden a real experience in the act of making it into art. And for what? To whom?
Many popular writers like Colleen Hoover succeed because they take awful experiences that a lot of (mostly women) readers have had, like domestic violence, and smelt & hammer them down into redemption stories. That’s fine for her, but writers like Hood cannot live with that denial of ambivalence and hastily ascribed meaning. I think it’s really beautiful to explore that hesitation in the act of artistic utterance.
Without having read this particular book, it’s hard to comment, but I do think there is some power in recognising hard experiences ARE hard, without needing to give them redemption arcs, necessarily. That can be validating for those who have experienced similar. In general we cannot anticipate what is valuable to readers, and the process of survival is innately interesting to people, I think. Your essay made me think about Woolf’s reflections on writing about ‘shocks’ in her life in ‘Sketch of the Past’, she seemed to find meaning in transforming experience though not everyone may feel the same.
I suppose the thing is that only a small section of readers care about the debate on whether the trauma plot is worthwhile or not. Whereas many, many readers can be drawn into a story about a struggle to survive, whatever the threat to survival is, whatever survival means in context, and whether survival is achieved or is worthwhile or not. It's a very compelling plot. We are never going to get bored of trauma and its effect on a figure that is fully realised for the reader, whether that figure is fictional or not. But again, debate about how much meaning trauma has runs dry of meaning quite quickly. I guess some people who have experienced trauma want to feel fancy and metafictional and to hear that would make them feel that they're not allowed to eat lunch with the smart kids. That's very understandable but understanding it doesn't circumvent the limitations of the smart kids.
I have not read this book and can’t pretend to comment on the toll of undergoing these experiences.
I think the stance here described is a frustratingly common one for people with much lighter loads to carry. I’m starting to feel a bit like people really need to go back and read the existentialists because we all seem to be working ourselves into a corner of having no control because we believe we have no control.
I’ve been reflecting on the experience of going in and out of depression over the course of my life, as well as all the reflecting and reflecting everyone like me is doing without ever getting to a conclusion or acting. Idk man.
Change the world? Can self-mockery
Give us the courage to tilt at life's
Windmills? In the end we all
Take to the same bed, our unjust
Wounds leaking, our souls leaping
Into the pachyderm sky, our demons
Intact as we face the same watery wall
As those pigs, the Gadarene swine.
KR, 5.5.2025
I'm reading Trauma Plot now. Thank you for thinking through your reaction in this thoughtful, hesitant post. I liked hearing you be a little bit unsure. I especially liked this: "I've come to realize that unadorned truth isn't necessarily a worthwhile artistic effect."