XIV. On Taking Stock

; or, 2024 in Review

Me in the hospital three days after surgery, doped to high heaven and serving in a medical gown when few believed it was possible …

Season’s greetings :) I’m going to try to be brief, but will likely fail!!!!

The main thing I wrote this year was a book.

It’s an enormous accomplishment, yes, and also I’m hard on myself, and also I’d been working on it a decade, and also finishing by deadline meant completing next to no freelance and minimal writing for the newsletter this year—which is to say it’s been easy for me to diminish the labor, care, and devotion that went into the book, or really, into almost anything I wrote in 2024. Nonetheless, I’m proud of what I’ve made. It’s a raw and gorgeous thing, my book, which was also a way of snatching life back from the black hole of grief, reckoning with The Rape Memoir, and repudiating the cultural backlash against “trauma literature.”

I’d like to believe I wrote with openness and generosity; I know I came from a place of profound vulnerability and real honesty. These aren’t simple acts.

Trauma Plot: A Life publishes on March 25th. It’s about many things, but maybe what I’d tell a curious stranger is that it’s a post-#MeToo memoir about how rape and shame ate my life for thirty years until, at last, I saw I wanted to live—to really live—and so had to figure out how people went about doing that.¹ Before, I was a zombie, but even on bad days now, I wake and want More Life. It astonishes me.

Beyond this, the book asks how we plot trauma; what sort of container can suffice. A notion often circulates that ~trauma~ is some unspeakable lacuna. I find this baffling! Despite its many disappointments, #MeToo proved nothing if not how terribly common and banally describable sexual violence is. Three better questions: (1) who, even within a culture of witness, is allowed to meaningfully speak; (2) how are these narratives made intelligible to a broad public; and (3) what is to be done in the wake of revelation?

Trauma Plot unfolds in four parts², with each sequence navigating traumatic testimony through a different form: the first is sort of a third-person auto-fictional academic mystery and sort of an homage to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the second is pretty straightforward first-person memoir refracted through something like crime reporting, the third is a second-person diaristic collage, the fourth is dialogues with my therapist. She / I / You / We. I’m just no good at divesting from hybridity.

(When the book was on submission an editor told my agent the structure was “too” “cerebral.” If you get me drunk enough I might tell you the labyrinthine philosopher this editor was editing at the time they said this. It’s pretty fucking funny.)

Philomela (John Gregory, 1924)

Now that I’ve survived pussy surgery I wake every day with two things top of mind: how happy I am to have an absolutely stunning vagina and how petrified I am the book will flop. After almost twenty years in the service industry, bartending more or less makes me want to die. It’s not that it’s an unsurvivable job, per se, especially now that I no longer drink on shift, but it’s gone on too long and I’ve had my fill of being condescended to by small-hearted people who treat service workers like tap-to-pay vending machines and don’t even tip well.

I’m a writer, full stop, and I want to spend the time I have left on this earth writing books. Not everyone gets to do the thing they want to do, of course; as Megan Draper’s mother tells her in the fifth season of Mad Men, “the world could not support that many ballerinas.”³ But for whatever reason, the possibility of my having a sustainable and long-term writing career feels powerfully contingent on the success or failure of the new book, which is perhaps not entirely true, but then, paranoia doesn’t always follow the most rational path.

One way to help me keep writing books is to pre-order Trauma Plot. Here’s the link for a third time, lol. I loathe self-promotion, I truly do, which is maybe a strange thing for a woman who relentlessly writes about her own life to say, but what unmoors me about the promotional apparatus is its nagging insistence on the Artist-as-Brand. I have no interest in influencership. I’m not an aspiring front-facing camera poet. I don’t want to do TikToks or unboxing videos, I don’t want to sell anyone homemade Trauma Plot-flavored toothpaste. God knows I don’t need anyone to model their life on mine. I long for economic freedom, yes, and (sure, okay) esteem—an audience, anyway—but I have no desire for fame, if celebrity is a phenomenon writers who aren’t Colleen Hoover or Sally Rooney will go on being given access to.

I don’t enjoy the mandate that authors be perpetually public-facing. What compelled me toward books and writing as a child was my preference for solitude. I loved literature because it helped me learn how to be—and to cherish being—alone. Literature requires acts of radical noticing: the practice of sitting absorbedly, and sans blinders, with other worlds and other lives, and also, finally, with the disorienting matrix of one’s self. It asks quiet, and privacy, and meditativeness.

And yet. In more book news, I’ve just hammered out the details for Trauma Plot’s audiobook, which releases on the same day as the print edition and which I’ll be narrating myself. A reissue of my first book, how to be a good girl, ALSO publishes on March 25th, thanks to Vintage Anchor. As many of you know, it’s been out of print since 2021, so I couldn’t be more thrilled about this development, in no small part because now I won’t have to perpetually parry DMs from people asking how to acquire a copy. (I’m teasing—the eagerness is lovely; it’s beautiful to be so in-demand.) While we’re on the subject, I’ll remind you all, too, that first edition copies selling on Amazon for like five hundred fucking dollars are scams. Don’t order them! I’d like to record the audiobook for good girl, too, so pre-order, pre-order, pre-order.

The hope, additionally, is that I’ll be able to go on a proper tour for these books, particularly as I didn’t have one in December 2020, when good girl came out. I’m doing three events in New York between March and April, one of which is announced.⁴ It’s likely I’ll be doing a stop in Providence and another in Asheville, and I’d love to travel to the West Coast—something I’ve never actually done before! If you’re a bookseller or a university who wants to help make an event happen, please reach out, so I can put you in touch with my publicist. <3

So that’s all that. What else did 2024 bring?

I ended things with the man I thought I would marry, who managed to break my heart twice. I’ve written about this already, though, so what use belaboring things further? I’ve been note-taking for a possible project about surgery recovery and break-ups, though who knows if it has any teeth. Really what I want to write next is a novel, one that’s been stewing for a few years now, but the truth is that projects arrive when they arrive. Habit and discipline help, but these things can’t be forced.

I watched world events with shock and horror, as I imagine most of us did. Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people is ongoing, is bought and paid for by the U.S. government and our tax dollars, and will prove—a truth I feel with my whole heart—to be the ineradicable moral issue of our time. While writing with particular attention to issues of sexual violence, I’ve thought often of the IOF’s systemic weaponization of rape and other methods of sexual torture. Every day this genocide continues is an immoral one; is an affront to life. It’s easy to feel helpless. Something I did today—for as I write this, it’s early Christmas morning—was to give the money I’m able and to share this thread of stagnant fundraisers for Palestinians in Gaza.

My Brilliant Friend Charlotte Shane has written, time and again, about our violent present in her always-unmissable newsletter, Meant for You, where she’s discussed the impossibility of silence on Israel’s crimes, the sins of the Biden administration, the Kamala Harris campaign, and the Democratic Party writ large, the anti-war Catholic Daniel Berrigan, and the search for god, or something like it. Her work is such a compass for me, a lighthouse beacon—I am deeply blessed to have her in my life. If you aren’t subscribed, you’re missing the fuck out.

I wrote a few things that weren’t Trauma Plot:

I was lucky enough to interview Charlotte for Bookforum, in honor of her latest memoir, An Honest Woman. It’s one of the few freelance projects I took on this year, and was surely the most fun. We talked about aesthetic interventions, sex work, loving men in the time of hetero-pessimism, and ethics, but all in the fun, extremely hot way.

Also for Bookforum, I reviewed Blake Butler’s memoir Molly, a book I often had trouble with but always took seriously, which is—in my opinion—the job of the critic, and a skill often lacking in a culture of criticism that prioritizes contrarian thinking and flashy takedowns.

In “Housewife Demonology,” for The New Inquiry, I revisited an essay I wrote in 2020 to look again at my desire for submission and housewifery, the reactionary consolidations in the years since then around “trad wives” and familial orthodoxy, as well as the death (both cultural and corporeal) of Betty Draper.

I wrote a very short piece on fame for Document and spoke with Victoria Chang about her latest poetry collection for Interview. Unless I’m forgetting something crucial, I think the only other short piece I did was one more for Bookforum, a review of Rachel Cusk’s latest “novel,” Parade, which isn’t a novel and which I liked a lot at the time but have since sort of cooled on. Really, that review was the place where I wrestled with my own relationship’s dissolution—a breakup I didn’t quite see was happening yet—and the conflict I felt between being a woman-on-the-way-to-becoming-a-wife and being a woman artist. The two came to appear irreconcilable, in any case in the context of that particular love. I have to hope that won’t always feel true.

I read books, a lot of them: one-hundred and twenty-six, to be exact, if my little log is to be believed, and I’ll probably finish another three or four by New Year’s Day.

I’m not sure if I’ve given up on Proust. I’m 200 pages into The Captive, and if I’m being honest, absolutely dread the sight of it on my nightstand. I’m going to read Christine Smallwood’s La Captive to see if it revives my passion, but otherwise, I’m moving on in March. I have other reading projects I’d like to conduct here—first and foremost, a series on doorstopper books by women writers, something I’m imagining as a year-long exploration.

My favorite books, in no real order and not exclusive to ones published this year, were Charlotte Shane’s An Honest Woman, Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, Alex Tanner’s Worry, Susie Boyt’s Loved & Missed, Constance Debre’s Playboy, Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, Suzanne Scanlon’s Her 37th Year, Elaine Kraf’s The Princess of 72nd Street, Lynne Tillman’s No Lease on Life, Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost, Emily Witt’s Health and Safety, and Eva Baltasar’s loose triptych of Solitary Woman novellas: Permafrost, Boulder, and Mammoth. I also worked my way through almost everything Susan Minot has written, which was really fun, and surprisingly therapeutic in my Big Breakup Era.

Books I can’t wait for in 2025, loosely arranged:

Transit pretty consistently has one of my favorite lists. In 2024, I especially loved Suzumi Suzuki’s Gifted and Ayşegul Savaş’s The Wilderness. 2025 brings a reissued Iman Mersal meditation on archives and motherhood, a newly translated literary travelogue from the Turkish writer Tezer Ozlü, and Josephine Rowe’s novel of a child saint.

Riverhead will publish a new memoir on sex, loss, trauma, and the peculiarities of the artist’s relation to memory from Yuknavitch—it’s dark and funny and experimental, just brilliant. Theory and Practice (Catapult) was my first—but won’t be my last—Kretser, and is an unputdownable academic sex dramedy about a woman who’s also reckoning with Virginia Woolf’s Orientalism. My wonderful publisher Pantheon is putting out the first of a pair of twinned novels by Smith, who is immensely prolific and who I’m desperate to do a deep dive on this year.

In this house we’re also big fans of the FSG list. Needless to say I’m overjoyed about the Ditlevsen selected poems—the Copenhagen trilogy is a favorite, and I loved the 2022 story collection The Trouble with Happiness very much. Shon Faye’s memoir of trans life and love has been on my anticipated list for a long while, and needless to say, I’ve been obsessed with Tsushima since Territory of Light was reissued a few years ago. I wrote about another of her novels, Woman Running in the Mountains, for my first time in print.

Columbia UP is bringing out two of Fang Fang’s books this year—The Running Flame was hugely controversial when it was first published in China in 2001—it concerns a woman giving an account of her life while on death row after seeking freedom from an unhappy marriage and an unplanned pregnancy. Nightboat will publish another mystical firestarter from Mattia with Unsex Me Here—I haven’t cracked it yet, but on the level of the line, Mattia is unbeatable. Very excited for this one.

Other things that brought me joy: new records by TR/ST (Performance), Being Dead (Eels), R. Missing (Knife Shook Your Hand), Jessica Pratt (Here in the Pitch), Wendy Eisenberg (Viewfinder, for which I wrote the liner notes!), and Crumb (Amama). I saw a fuck ton of movies, but the ones I’m still thinking about are Janet Planet, Thelma, L’ete dernier, La Chimera, and Anora. I’m dying to see Nosferatu, Babygirl, and The Last Showgirl before the end of the year. I saw Stevie Nicks, a Jenny Wilson and ionnalee double header, Tempers, TRST, Being Dead, Dry Cleaning, and Public Memory live. Also some other shows but I don’t remember what they were. I went to Brighton Beach for the first time, and loved it. I upgraded long walks and yoga from ~most days~ to Every Day, current surgery recovery notwithstanding. I had a lot of sex, some of which was good and most of which was mostly fine, but joyous in the sense that I felt I finally understood the shapes my desire takes. I stopped tolerating the bad behavior of men. I cut back on drinking, I quit smoking, I spent more time at home making my apartment beautiful. I figured out who my real friends are and counted every moment with my dog as precious. I got a FUCKING VAGINA and she’s just stunning, according to the surgical team in my post-ops. (I agree with them.) I’m recovering, and fast. The year was a devastation, but more and more light breaks through each day. That’s kintsugi, or whatever Lana said.

Olive and I send our love and wish you all a very happy holiday season. Until 2025!

xoxoxo

jamie

1. Though mostly I sidestep the conversation, saying only that it’s a memoir concerning the last decade. There’s no surer way to bring a first date to a crashing halt than telling a man I just finished a book about rape lmao ;(

2. Or five, counting the introductory chapter …

3. I feel sure I’ve referenced this scene here before … whatever, it’s a good one.

4. Tuesday, March 25th at McNally Jackson, Seaport, 6:30PM — link available soon.