Trauma Plot is a fierce argument for the confessional and a kaleidoscopic self-interrogation after sexual violence ... When Hood writes with deep self-awareness, treating her life as a necessary subject for investigation, she venerates every survivor’s story. Trauma Plot is not only sharp but so readable, I devoured it whole ... A blueprint for gathering yourself together in the wake of sexual violence, including those parts pushed into the shadow.
Hood writes rising peril particularly well ... Hood’s writing is exceptional for its own sake; she’s a remarkable critic, illuminating what you know is there, turning your head towards it.
A destabilizing achievement of radical self-exposure, interrogation of form, and defiance of reader expectation ... She performs a relentless, fiery demonstration for all of us ... It’s also the stuff of literature. Yet Hood will not cut her conscience to fit this year’s literary fashions ... Florid, flowing...prose .... The personification of trauma is deft and fresh ... The last twenty pages of Part I are brilliant ... The frightening, grossly common street harassment is expertly distilled ... The most riveting resurfacing of a buried memory of sexual abuse I’ve ever read ... Bold and valuable ... Chillingly evocative ... I started to struggle in the middle of Part II. Despite all the disclosure and intimacy on the page, I didn’t feel as close to Hood as I wanted ... You feel the accumulating simple subject-predicate sentences fall heavily in Part III ... Her interrogations of trauma-writing are often piercing, but the question marks in their sheer volume come to diminish one another’s effects ... Hood has accomplished a rare feat: she has expanded the possibilities for a trauma memoir.
Hood’s writing is strong, elegant, and precise, which makes this haunting account profoundly powerful and compelling ... Hood is simultaneously a lyrical poet who uses language in unexpected ways and an unflinchingly honest, keen observer of base ugliness.
With bracing detail, a practiced poetic consciousness, and something like foreboding mysticism, she excavates the layers of both her personal experience and what it reflects about sexualized violence against women generally and transwomen in particular ... The artistic intentionality of Hood’s narration meets the genius of her project ... She deftly carves into the tensions between particularity and exceptionality, arc and causality, how we tell stories of suffering and whywe tell them to reimagine her personhood and reorient readers toward empathy ... A magnificent, norm-shattering work.
