A brief bonjour
; or, two weeks until Trauma Plot!
Trauma Plot is out two weeks from today.
I have a dazed sort of feeling about this, surreal and disjointed. It’s a profoundly vulnerable period, and, at moments, my rawness manifests in ways I anticipated and planned for. At others, it arrives with an electrical jolt, is alien, shocking, it rocks my body and leaves my mind to catch up. I don’t remember it being like this with the first book, but that one came out in the thick silence of Omicron, and anyway, all of 2020 was a fever dream. Not that good girl wasn’t vulnerable, but Trauma Plot sticks my neck out in a more unnerving fashion. I’m trying to figure out how best to protect myself, and am mostly beginning to realize I can’t—what happens now just happens. I’m no longer in control.
Reception thus far has been warm, even glowing. Only one interview rubbed me a bit against the grain—but then, it wasn’t that the dynamic was antagonistic or invasive, only that it seemed obvious I was being positioned as a kind of bleeding heart, and challenging myself in real time to work against some preconception of my naivete actually revved my intellectual engines. I had a lot of fun! I will say, however, that my battery needs recharging. As I’ve probably mentioned, I’m really an introvert in disguise, and the demand to be On as much as I’ve had to be in the last four or six weeks has taken a few pounds of flesh from me. I feel utterly exhausted. I need to be on a fucking beach somewhere.
The other day a friend asked if I’m scared heading into publication and I guess I am, or anyway, I guess I’m scared of a possibility I talk about in the book itself, which is that the press cycle will function as a stand-in of sorts for the rape trials I refused to endure.1 Watching what happened to Amber Heard chilled me, as I know it did for countless women.
In a number of interviews I’ve done recently, I’ve talked about how I never expected the book to arrive at the dawn of a second Trump administration. Trauma Plot, as I hope many of you soon will see, opens with the Access Hollywood tapes, #MeToo, the Women’s March, and the Kavanaugh hearings. Nearly a decade later, we’re faced with a Republican party that is not only indifferent to or winking about sexual violence, but is explicitly pro-rape. For all its blustering about trafficking rings and groomers, this is a coterie of politicians who just welcomed the Tate brothers—literal human traffickers—with open arms. (Not that I have any love for the Democrats, but that’s a subject for another day.)
It’s also incredibly bizarre to release a book while Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people is ongoing, while Mahmoud Kahlil2 is being illegally detained for protesting this genocide, while each day executive orders and state bills surface to demonize and eradicate trans people, while—the list goes on. I don’t say this in a perfunctory way, or to beg for absolution concerning the sin of self-promotion. I don’t enjoy schmoozing, period, and what I’m doing lately does feel diverting. I don’t know how to reconcile things.
I have to hope my book might help people, which has always been the idea—to connect, to defuse shame, to make others feel less alone. That said, I hope we’re all still paying attention. I hope we’re all still doing what we’re able to dissent. Today I donated to Mahmoud’s legal defense fund. It’s not everything, but it’s a start.
Apologies for the brevity—as you might imagine, things are quite chaotic.
In love and solidarity,
Jamie
Some orders of business
If you haven’t pre-ordered the book, maybe you’d consider doing so? My first, how to be a good girl, will likewise be reissued that day. The audio books for each—I narrated both—also come out on the 25th.
Events!
March 25 (release night) - McNally Jackson Seaport, ticketed, 630, with the legend Rayne Fisher-Quann
March 30 - Topos Too in Ridgewood, 7, with three of my dearest friends, Charlotte Shane, Jasmine Sanders, and Harron Walker
April 1 - Book Culture uptown, 7, with Kate Zambreno, whose work has been such a profound influence
This is, of course, a technically optimistic outcome, because it assumes the book will have a resonating press cycle at all.
Thankfully, at the time of this writing, a judge has blocked Khalil’s deportation.