Friday essay: trauma memoirs can help us understand the unthinkable. They can also be art

Content warning: readers are advised this article talks about sexual abuse and child sexual abuse.

As a writer who has experienced the trauma of sexual violence – and who reads and writes about it – Jamie Hood admits to a “soft spot” for Hanya Yanagihara’s divisive 2015 bestseller, A Little Life, often derided as trauma porn. She even describes herself as the “Jude” of “several” of her friend groups, a reference to the novel’s relentlessly abused lead character.

“There’s something in its excess that rang true to me when I first read it,” Hood writes in the introduction to her new book, Trauma Plot: A Life, which mixes memoir and criticism. While Yanagihara’s novel is fiction, for Hood, it understands “it’s possible to spend most of a life reckoning with sexual trauma”.

Not all literary critics share Hood’s appreciation. In her now infamous New Yorker essay, The Case Against the Trauma Plot, Parul Sehgal indicts A Little Life as the “exemplary novelistic incarnation” of contemporary culture’s obsessive interest in “trauma theory”. Subject to “unending mortifications”, the novel’s central figure Jude is more “a walking chalk outline” and a “vivified DSM entry” than he is a fully realised person, Sehgal argues.

Sehgal’s essay eloquently captured a rising backlash to trauma narratives. Over the last decade, stories of trauma have appeared everywhere, from case studies embedded in bestselling popular psychology books by psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score) and physician Gabor Maté, to social media accounts devoted to trauma awareness and recovery, to what Slate journalist Laura Bennett described back in 2015 as the “first-person industrial complex”.

Sehgal’s survey sweeps right across popular culture, taking in television and cinema – but literature is what she knows best. Not surprisingly, Sehgal’s critique gained the most traction among writers and critics.

Her dissection of the trauma plot even partly inspired Australian novelist Diana Reid’s latest novel, Signs of Damage (2025). As she writes in the afterword, it “is about, among other things, the omnipresence of psychoanalytic concepts – not just in art, but in the stories we tell about our own lives”. Reid has also offered her own critique of tragic back stories as contemporary cliché.

In Trauma Plot, Hood takes aim at “the subterranean, insidious idea” she detects lurking beneath the critiques of Seghal and others: that trauma writing is inherently “unexamined, crude, and lacking in competence with self-reflexivity, humor, and play”. Such assumptions, she continues, rehash “an old trick, the same used to argue that autobiography is antithetical to art” or “confessional writing is without tradition”. In this logic, trauma is damned as “only ever individual, and functionally apolitical”, even when authors explicitly position their texts otherwise.

Sehgal largely sidestepped the #MeToo movement as one influential recent catalyst for sharing accounts of trauma, but Hood does not. She is well aware of the critiques of #MeToo’s limitations – and has charted its twists, turns and aftermaths elsewhere, as well as in her memoir. But she acknowledges it, too, as a source of inspiration and solidarity – and one origin of her book.

The knowledge “sexual violence was everywhere, and all the time” helped free her from ego, and from isolating shame: “What a relief to find I wasn’t special. And how devastating.”

However, #MeToo is only one origin story for Trauma Plot. Others include the myth of Philomela, from Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Philomela, an Athenian princess, was raped by her brother-in-law Terereus; afterwards, when she “does not go quietly”, he cut out her tongue. For Hood, what happens next – Philomela learns the loom, “creating a tapestry to transmit her torment in a different design” – offers both a “provocative diagnosis of rape as a formal problem” and a solution: “a kaleidoscopic technique of narration”.

The neoclassical rendering of Philomela by early 20th-century American sculptor John Gregory adorns the hardcover edition of Trauma Plot. It’s a striking alternative to the “bloody image” of Judith Beheading Holofernes (c. 1620) by Italian baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, which illustrated many #MeToo testimonials – and for a time, evoked Hood’s own rage at her rapists.

The epigraph to Trauma Plot is from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925):

She had a perpetual sense […] of being out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.

Hood’s first section is an homage of sorts to the novel’s day-in-the-life, stream-of-consciousness interiority. Of all Woolf’s novels, Mrs Dalloway is the one most often read as semi-autobiographical and as a reckoning with unresolved trauma: of England’s in the wake of the first world war, and in the novelist’s own life.

Hood’s re-imagining joins an ever-expanding set of creative responses to Mrs Dalloway, most recently – prior to Hood’s – the novel Thunderhead by Australian writer Miranda Darling (2024).

In her case against the trauma plot, Sehgal conscripts Woolf as the counterpoint to the contemporary excesses of Yanagihara and A Little Life. For Sehgal, where the contemporary trauma plot “flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom, and, in turn, instructs and insists upon its moral authority”, Woolf offers nuance, ambiguity, and above all, character. Even writing of her own sexual abuse by her half-brothers when she was a child, Woolf is, for Sehgal, admirably restrained.

Yet as Hood’s memoir attests, Woolf has long been a lodestar for writers grappling with trauma – in their lives, and on the page, especially women writers. French author Neige Sinno in her arresting memoir of child sexual abuse, Sad Tiger, is also drawn to Woolf. Like Sehgal, she’s impressed by the brevity and clarity of Woolf’s autobiographical writing about her half-brothers, but there is recognition too in how Woolf conveyed the “emotions that she felt, what in the future would come to be called traumatic shock”.

For Sinno, Woolf’s essays support her view that “writing can only happen once the work, or part of the work, has been done, that part of the work that consists of emerging from the tunnel”.

Together, Hood and Sinno present a radical challenge to any suggestion the “trauma plot” has exhausted itself and is a literary dead end. They are serious writers, and Trauma Plot and Sad Tiger are genre-bending memoirs arising from – but hardly confined to – their experiences of sexual violence and trauma.

Content warning

To summarise what happened to Sinno and Hood is to issue a content warning.

Sinno’s stepfather first came into her life when she was about six years old and not long after, raped her for the first time, then continued to do so until she was around 14. Later, aged 19, Sinno’s then-lover – an artist, some 35 years older – convinced her to take the case to court to protect her younger siblings.

First, before she could file a complaint, she told her mother, who took over a year to leave her husband (the father of two of her four children). The trial was, of course, an ordeal, but her stepfather confessed to most of the charges and was handed a nine-year prison sentence.

In France – where the case was tried, though by then Sinno had moved to the US to study literature – this outcome was “not typical”, nor is it anywhere else. “Presumably,” writes Sinno, “this is because the rapes began when I was very young, went on for a long time, fulfilled the criteria for a serious crime, and were perpetrated by a figure of authority”.

In 2015, Hood was gang raped by five men, which as she writes on her opening page “wasn’t my first experience of sexual violence, far from it – but it was the worst of them. It nearly killed me.” One night, in the aftermath, she walked into traffic and “waited for death to come”.

These brute details are both shocking and ordinary. Once Hood starts talking about her rapes, she finds out some of her friends have also been raped. Before this, “she felt like an alien marooned on a hostile planet”. Sinno argues the “taboo in our culture is not rape itself, which is commonplace everywhere, it is talking about it, thinking about it, analyzing it”.

Here, Sinno is referring specifically to Vladimir Nabokov’s notorious novel Lolita (1955), written from the perspective of Humbert Humbert, a paedophile who kidnaps and sexually abuses his 12-year-old stepdaughter, claiming obsessive love for his “nymphet”. When she first read it, Sinno “wasn’t expecting to find so much overlap with my own grim history”. Against other readings of Lolita as a defence of Humbert, or a love story, for Sinno, Nabokov captures the “absurdity” of the perpetrator’s “perverse consciousness”.

Following Nabokov, Sinno is a writer interested in confronting the taboo of rape on the page. She begins Sad Tiger with a “portrait of my rapist”, from an adult perspective. Sinno tries to imagine what others – especially her mother – saw in him. “She liked his muscular physique, the energy he gave off.” But Sinno cannot sustain it: her perspective is inevitably that of his child victim.

“Victim” and “survivor” are loaded words – they carry power, but can be easily flattened at the expense of personhood or by the demands of representation. Sinno claims no special insight: “I’m a survivor. I don’t know why.” For Hood, “there’s a danger in infantalizing survivors of sexual violence, like we have no capacity for decision making.” At various points, to emphasise provisional and hesitant identification, she puts both “victim” and “survivor” in “scare quotes”.

Yet, it’s also the case that both Sinno and Hood were abused as children, and each ponder whether there was something which made them especially vulnerable to predators, or as Sinno puts it, “to being a victim”. In therapy, Hood was confronted by the lingering effects of being molested as a child, and then publicly shamed for it: “I saw I wasn’t a child then, or even a person really, but a place – the place where rape went, and where rape belonged.”

For Hood, this sense of herself as “vacancy” was a necessary phase, but as “time passes, abjection feels less useful to me”. For Sinno, however, where others might feel distance from their childhood self, she – writing as a 44-year-old – does not: “It’s always the present for me. It’s always me, it’s always now.”

Sinno holds two truths. One:

there can never be a happy ending for someone who was abused as a child. It is a mistake and a source of suffering to believe in the myth of the survivor like you see in the movies.

Repurposing the hideous title of a dark web child pornography wing, Sinno presents her book as “proof” of what is means to be “damaged for life”.

The second truth, which does not cancel out the first, “is that once you can talk about the truth, it means that you have been set slightly free”. The court room is one site where Sinno speaks of how she was subjected to “an endless orgy of violation”, though with no illusions that this is justice or a “solution”. (She and Hood are both sceptical of criminal justice approaches, but Sinno wanted to make sure her stepfather was no danger to her siblings.) She’s never been in therapy or analysis, however, because

where I come from, we don’t do that, we’re afraid, we know what awaits in the kinds of places available to us, public services staffed by overworked, often barely qualified practitioners […] where the chances are you’ll end up seeing someone who’s completely snowed under or pretty much incompetent.

Like Sinno, Hood comes from a background of poverty, but in her case, therapy is transformative. Structurally, and in terms of what she ruefully calls her “Chronology of My Life and Trauma”, Hood’s memoir culminates in therapy with “Helen” over Zoom, beginning during Covid.

Their sessions continue into a recognisable “present”, with wars against the Palestinian people, and against trans women. Before this, Hood had not made being trans central to her story – or rather, to how she presents her story – but in this section, in therapy, this fact surges powerfully forward. It compounds the ongoing reality that women are far more often, and more likely, to be raped than men; trans women even more so.

Both authors are acutely aware of how the language of trauma can easily congeal into cliché, or be weaponised.

At his trial, Sinno’s stepfather presented his own experience of childhood sexual abuse, “in the classic style of trauma”, and she finds it credible, though hardly excusable. Hood wrestles with the enduring cliché that surviving trauma “makes you stronger, or makes you the person you are, teaching you profound lessons about the sort of life you should want to lead”. Sinno is similarly “appalled by a hierarchy that makes the person who recovers, in contrast with the person who cannot, a superhuman being”.

Yet in taking their own experiences of trauma seriously, by directing their writing and reading towards understanding and articulating it, Hood and Sinno expand the horizons of what trauma literature can be. Their books mark the arrival of two major literary talents.

Memoirs and #MeToo

The cultural contexts and touchstones which inform Sad Tiger and The Trauma Plot are easily delineated, including by the authors themselves.

Hood plunges the reader right in: she began writing her book a year after she was gang-raped and at the onset of the “Trump era”, just before #MeToo went viral in 2017. The bulk of her memoir is set in 2013, first in Boston, where Hood taught and studied literature as a PhD student. Next, in New York City, where she moved that same year partly to get away from sexual violence, only to encounter more of it.

But #MeToo reverberates throughout, as promise, as disappointment, and as a damning indictment of US culture. “One of the great disappointments of #MeToo,” she reflects, “was its reconsolidation of the status quo, the way it calibrated around monsters and angels”. Hood mocks as absurd the notions women like Christine Blasey Ford and Amber Heard, who clearly paid a heavy price for speaking out about the abuse they suffered from high-profile men, did it simply for attention and “to ruin some poor man’s life”.

Sinno was writing during 2021, “at the very moment France is debating whether or not to abolish the statute of limitations for sexual crimes against children”. That year, partly provoked by the 2020 publication of writer and editor Vanessa Spingora’s memoir Le Consentement, the French government voted into legislation an age threshold of non-consent at 15, meaning no child under this age can be considered to have consented to sex and therefore sex with a minor is rape. In regards to incest, the age of non-consent is set higher, to 18. The statute of limitations, however, remain in place.

In France, memoirs have played an influential role in exposing abusers and the culture which enables them, while also garnering international attention. Spingora’s bracing account of how back in the 1980s she was groomed into a four-year sexual relationship when she was 14 by middle-aged French writer Gabriel Matzneff was published in English in 2021 as Consent. Like Spingora’s memoir, Sinno’s was translated by prize-winning translator and author Natasha Lehrer.

In Sad Tiger, Sinno contemplates the perspective offered in another memoir which attracted major public attention in France when it was published in 2021: Camille Kouchner’s La Familia Grande (the English translation by Adriana Hunter was published in 2022 as The Familia Grande: A Memoir).

A lawyer and academic from a family of famous intellectual and cultural elites, Kouchner sensationally revealed a family secret: her stepfather, the political scientist Olivier Duhamel, had sexually abused her twin brother on a regular basis while they were still children.

La Familia Grande inspired the hashtag #MeTooInceste in France, and further galvanised the push for new child sexual abuse laws. Of particular interest for Sinno, however, is how Kouchner is one step removed from the abuse, thereby offering a “way of discussing incest as a social phenomenon while avoiding the unbearable pathos of direct suffering”.

Yet by bringing such texts into the orbit of her own “head-on” narrative, Sinno also opens up a wider discussion, spotlighting the ripple effects of abuse within and beyond the immediate family, as well as the cultural contexts in which such abuse can be easily concealed by the veneer of sexual openness or family values.

To date, the critical response to both Sad Tiger and Trauma Plot has been overwhelmingly positive. Sad Tiger was originally published in France in 2023, where it swiftly became a bestseller and won some of the nation’s most prestigious literary prizes.

The 2025 English-language edition is emblazoned with a blurb from Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux. She described it to the New York Times Book Review as the “most powerful, profound book I’ve ever read about the devastation of one person’s childhood by an adult”.

The hardcover US edition of Trauma Plot features blurbs from cult authors Torrey Peters and Kate Zambreno. On its release, the book was featured everywhere from the literary magazine Bookforum (where Hood is a contributor) to Vogue. In the US, Hood’s first book How to be a Good Girl: A Miscellany, originally published during the Covid pandemic in 2020, was reissued by Vintage the same day Trauma Plot was released.

Annie Ernaux – like Woolf and Nabokov – is a writer both Sinno and Hood seek out. Provocative French novelist Virginie Despentes is another, particularly King Kong Theory, her book of essays about rape. These overlaps point to a canon of (mostly) women writers who have created literature from previously taboo topics. But each memoir is also a highly distinctive account of a reading life, shaped by their own specific experiences and their own desires to find and create meaning from them.

When Hood left Boston, she fled both repeated sexual violation and a stifling Ivy League program. In her abandoned dissertation – a project which, it could be argued, triumphantly lives on in Trauma Plot – Hood sought to draw connections between her beloved poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and “the talk-show era, ‘90s’ women’s rock, the contemporary memoir and the personal essay boom, autofiction, Lena Dunham’s Girls”.

In New York City, time is measured by nights at the bars where Hood works and plays, and by books read and reread, from Charlotte Bronte’s Vilette (1853) to Cruel Optimism (2011) by the late cultural theorist Lauren Berlant.

As her romantic relationship dissolves, Hood returns to a favourite novel, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. First published in 1962, it is widely considered to be Lessing’s masterpiece as well as her most challenging novel. In this instance, rereading The Golden Notebook “doesn’t help matters at home”, but the novel’s multilayered form and its animating concerns – sex, art, relationships, the violence that can erupt between men and women, therapy – are evident influences, among others, on Trauma Plot.

Where Hood clearly knows her feminist theory, and advances some of her own, Sinno has never sought it out. Instead, she “learned to think about violence from novels about slavery, the Shoah, the Algerian War”.

Through the work of French journalist Jean Hatzfeld, she read testimonies of both victims and perpetrators of the genocide in Rwanda. Unlike Hatzfeld, she is not surprised the murderers he interviewed revealed no secrets and claimed no nightmares.

The inspiration for her book’s title, Sad Tiger, comes from William Blake’s poem The Tyger, from Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) and its echo in the title of the controversial memoir by French writer Margaux Fragoso, Tiger, Tiger (2011).

Fragoso’s story of being sexually abused by her 57-year-old neighbour from the age of seven until he suicided over a decade later caused a sensation when published. At the time, Sinno “wondered why readers would choose to immerse themselves in such atrocities”. Sinno came to it later, after she had been through treatment for ovarian cancer, the same disease Fragoso died of in 2017, aged 38.

Writing the unthinkable

In their literary and philosophical ambitions, each book recalls Carmen Maria Machardo’s dazzlingly inventive memoir In the Dream House (2019), her polyphonic account of the domestic abuse she endured some years earlier from her then-girlfriend.

All three writers generatively experiment with genre, form and perspective. Hood shifts from third to second to first person, as far as each can productively take her. Sinno contemplates evidence of her life in newspapers, photographs, legal briefs and testimony, including that of her stepfather. At the same time, she ponders her own investments in this material.

Is it about being more accurate? An attempt to fill in the gaps? Or is it a way of trying to extricate myself, to escape this subjective version that haunts and suffocates me?

In Machado’s case, however, she was writing into a void, given the scant existing literature on the topic. Sinno and Hood face down different challenges. Hood offers a defence and reinvention of the “trauma plot” against backlash to its ubiquity in contemporary culture. Among the numerous reasons Sinno lists for “not wanting to write this book” is she “does not want to specialize in rape literature”. The topic is not so taboo that an established genre does not exist.

Doubts, second thoughts and hesitations litter both texts. Sinno is not sure if she “has anything at all to offer victims and their families, or even just someone who wants a better understanding of the subject”. Nor can she be certain if “the book offers me anything, either as a human being or a writer”. She does not “believe in writing as therapy” and even if she did, “the idea of healing myself with this book appals me”.

Hood raises similar questions about her project as it unfolds. She ponders the connection – if at all – between what she has suffered and her desire to create art, to write. “Does art live in me,” she asks, “not because of trauma, but because I sought beauty when there was none?” Hood is more open to the possibility writing can have a therapeutic purpose, but she still places “healing” in quotation marks.

Ultimately, as the publication of these stunning memoirs attests, both Hood and Sinno acknowledge the wider value of their writing, as literature and as a cultural intervention. In doing so, they announce themselves as talented writers, with the promise of more books to come.

Post #MeToo, Hood is “not writing this to be believed. I’m writing to open space in myself for other books, to offer solace – I hope – to others who have lived through this.” Sinno, the more reluctant memoirist, overcomes her resistance to it enough to accept that autobiographical writing has as much claim to literature as fiction.

She writes: “Is that not, after all, the purpose of literature, to get the unthinkable out there at last?”

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Zora Simic receives funding from the Australian Research Council.