Starred review from February 1, 2025
A memoir of sexual violence told in four parts. Between 2012 and 2014, Hood was raped three times, a devastatingly condensed succession of assaults connected only by their victim. Each of these incidents anchors a section of Hood's text, which shifts from third to first to second person as the author tries to make sense of the before, during, and after of these cuts of trauma. 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. Hood leans into both the horror of the acts and the chaos of the fallout between them, marked with excessive drinking and drug use, starvation, and casual and risky sex--and by increasing dissociation and despair. The specific, palpable darkness of her telling holds the reader's gaze on Hood's individual story even as she pitches these details against a broader social inquiry that acknowledges the ubiquity and dailiness of rape and trauma. Her fourth, final section gathers around her work to process and name what happened to her as rape, synthesizing and situating these most recent experiences of sexual violence within her history and identity. Here, the artistic intentionality of Hood's narration meets the genius of her project. She is strikingly aware of the landscape of literary confessional, regarding rape in particular, into which she is preparing to release her story and sits on a plane of meta-analysis that not only considers womanhood, sensuality, and victimization, but also closely inspects how these things are spoken and written about. She deftly carves into the tensions between particularity and exceptionality, arc and causality, how we tell stories of suffering andwhy we tell them to reimagine her personhood and reorient readers toward empathy. A magnificent, norm-shattering work.
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February 1, 2025
Like her first book, How to Be a Good Girl (2020), Hood's second is difficult to categorize, combining memoir and criticism. Relating unspeakable events from her past, she conveys her emotional and psychological trauma, damage, and outrage as she confronts being raped on three separate occasions. This trauma is set against documented accounts of rape victims across history. She draws on letters, artworks, testimonials, other writing, and social analyses while assessing her own situation with brutal honesty. Hood's writing is strong, elegant, and precise, which makes this haunting account profoundly powerful and compelling. She recounts harrowing scenes and vividly describes how she navigates her continuing existence, never knowing when something is going to trigger an unpredictable response and not always sure if what she's experiencing is reality, memory, or hallucination. Hood is simultaneously a lyrical poet who uses language in unexpected ways and an unflinchingly honest, keen observer of base ugliness. This is not an inspirational story of salvation but an account of a survivor and her ongoing struggle towards healing.
COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.