Friends for nearly a decade, the writers Jamie Hood and Harron Walker convened at the former’s apartment in Brooklyn to crack open a bottle of wine and discuss their forthcoming books (Hood’s Trauma Plot: A Life, out March 25 from Pantheon; Walker’s Aggregated Discontent: Confessions of the Last Normal Woman, out May 20 from Random House). As the bottle slowly emptied on that chilly February night, they dipped in and out of the topic at hand as they explored their respective interest in writing about their lives, reminisced over their glorious sisterhood, and laughed more than can be captured in an after-the-fact transcription. At various points, they were joined by Olive Hood, Jamie’s daughter and beloved dog, who silently napped beside them for much of the conversation.

Harron Walker: I want to say the first time I saw you was at C’mon Everybody. You did that thing where you were like, “I work on this day, do you wanna come by the bar,” which I now know is the thing you do—

Jamie Hood: —to vet people.

HW: Yes! You’re like, “I’m a busy woman, I’m a bitch with an attitude, you can be near me while I’m doing something I would already be doing,” all with a three-foot bar barrier between you and anyone.

JH: It’s classic Jamie. This is a Jamie Hood joint.

HW: You’re always saying that.

JH: I do actually say that… It’s really embarrassing.

HW: The first real hangout, I came to your house, and you made pizza. I met Olive for the first time.

HW: I was so impressed by your relationship with Olive.

JH: I lucked out. She’s everything; she’s the whole world.

HW: There’s a line in Trauma Plot about you knowing so few trans women who primarily date cis men, and that was something we bonded over, dating men. Maybe it’s a question to reevaluate: Why do we like men? Do we still like men?

JH: Do you?

HW: Yeah, do you?

JH: I’m obsessed with men—

HW: To quote Lady Gaga—

JH: “I hail men.” A central preoccupation of my life and work is: What is desire? What propels me toward men? There’s always been something strange about my desire for men, because men have never been safe for me. That’s a chaotic knot in my life: Why do I like men when they’ve done so much harm to me?

HW: In how to be a good girl, one of the book’s stated goals was to create a self you might then become. You liken it to birth but make a lot of knowing allusions to a history of criticism against women’s art as biological, instinctive, procreative. One part of your creation was a self who exists outside of men’s validation. How has your relationship with desire and men changed since then?

JH: Desire is still the question. Of course, good girl came into being because of “Fucking Like a Housewife,” an essay about Mad Men’s Betty Draper and my Cruel Optimism-style identification with her, this desire to be a housewife—a kind of lobotomized woman taken care of by a Don-Daddy—and wondering whether that archetype of womanhood was accessible to trans women.

HW: I remember sitting on a park bench with you at Herbert Von King in summer 2019—maybe you’d just pitched the piece to Charlie [Markbreiter] at The New Inquiry? I had an epiphany I don’t stand by now, but that was helpful at the time. After a breakup, I said this kind of womanhood isn’t made for me, so of course it wouldn’t work for me. I’m compassionate towards younger me, but the idea was, “I’m fated for loneliness, PERIOD.”

JH: We were really going through it.

HW: You challenged me on that bench, you said something against that nihilism and with real hope, and it was one of the first instances of you nudging me toward optimism in a…political—I almost said scatological—

JH: Well, sure. “Girl, just paint him,” et cetera.

HW: “You can shit anywhere!” you said. And then you stood up and walked away. I was like, “I think I’ll start now.”

JH: And that bench never recovered. [laughs] In “Pick Me,” from Aggregated Discontent, you write about needing to find someone to tell you what to do next. Part of our desire for men calibrates around this need for someone to take control of our lives, which felt so rudderless. It was a desire, in a way, for God, which is a deeply Beauvoir-ian sensibility. Beauvoir argues that heterosexuality relies on women becoming abject supplicants for their men, who we make into gods. There’s something still quite beautiful to me in devotionalism. The difference now is, I can get into mutual obsession, but what I’m not going to do is be someone’s fangirl. Like, I’m never going to do that; I’ll never compromise my sense of my own wondrousness again. Devotion is very beautiful in love, but I don’t think worship or supplication are. I was thinking how we had to imagine our lives and our heterosexuality as women without real models. I didn’t personally know any medically-transitioned trans women until I moved to New York. I didn’t know our lives were possible until then!

HW: Ty Mitchell once described that era in the 2010s as the Audition-or-Transition moment, where people in the Brooklyn drag scene—in the wake of Drag Race popping off—were like, “Am I going to audition for Drag Race or just be a woman?” Because, at the time, you could only do one or the other.

JH: Literally mutually exclusive categories.

JH: I remember when Macy Rodman came out, how revelatory that was. I was very on the nightlife scene at the time because of R., who wasn’t doing much drag but was dealing a fuck ton of blow to everyone in that circuit.

HW: I suddenly understand R.’s appeal.

JH: The cocaine? Yeah, it was free-flowing.

HW: Oh! R. is in your book! The coke dealer friend who got you into all the parties.

JH: Yes. R. was living with F., who started doing meth, and R. and I staged an intervention. I was like, “I can’t believe you would smoke meth!” Meanwhile, the three of us were out snorting coke every night straight into the morning…truly my Laura Palmer era.

HW: I’m glad it didn’t go full Laura Palmer.

JH: Me too. Getting back, though, we approach transness very differently in our work. A lot of your writing in the book, and also much of your freelance writing, brings trans artistry and trans life and pleasure and joy to the foreground. I didn’t feel there were many models of trans life when I was younger. I write about this in Trauma Plot—the only trans women I saw until I moved to New York were dead ones at the beginning of SVU episodes. It would be like, “The chick with a dick is a vic tonight,” or whatever.

HW: Yeah, there was also a real muddling of categories in cinema. I loved Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but then To Wong Foo, Priscilla—those ‘90s drag movies about drag queens who lived like trans women, but the viewer would be like, “That’s a gay guy.” These movies collapse distinctions.

JH: I’m trying to think when I first saw transsexuality as a fully autonomous category in film. I remember seeing Paris is Burning in college—

HW: It’s telling that a documentary centering transsexual women speaking for themselves reads very differently.

JH: Yeah, but really I was thinking about you as an historian of trans life. You’ve created an index of trans existence in your work, your work deeply attends to the fact that our lives and pleasure and artistry are worthy of documentation. It argues that we’re worthy of being kept on record.

HW: Right, I have a trans-centrism in my work. It’s not like I think Nancy Pelosi is going to read my work and shut down every ICE detention center and release all imprisoned trans women and then everyone else, or that she’s going to go to Nancy Mace and all the other Nancys in Congress and be like, “Mama, we have to let bathrooms be bathrooms.”

JH: Pelosi’s too busy filling her freezer with Jeni’s ice cream—

JH: Have you ever thought about doing a biography? When I was reading your essay on Greer Lankton, I could imagine you writing her biography!

HW: A biography would be like the final boss of the sort of profiles I do. Would you ever want to write one?

JH: I still think I’d like to write a book about Plath at some point. I don’t think it would be a biography, though, or a work of literary criticism—it would be something stranger.

HW: I love the way you engage with women’s writing and the ways it’s been dismissed—how in order for a woman to be believed, she has to prove herself to be a perfect victim, a perfect narrator of her life. She’s forced to pursue a degree of objectivity that is denied to women, period. I love how you grapple with that on the page, asking yourself why you’re writing this, who are you writing this for, are you writing this book to be believed. You’re resistant to crafting what you describe as the expected rape memoir, with its simple, three-act structure: I was raped, I dealt with it, and now I’m fab.

JH: I can’t wait to get to the fab part.

[Laughter]

HW: How did you arrive at an honest narrative?

JH: My fascination with women’s confessionalism feels inextricable from the traumatic history of my life. I’ve been justifying women’s art my entire career. There’s a clear line of continuity between rape testimony and women’s life-writing and self-portraiture: women are never trusted to give an account of ourselves, we’re never imagined to be the appropriate arbiters of our own narratives. The conventional rape memoir arc just didn’t fit, if that arc is: I had a very usual life, and then this horrible thing happened to me; but then I got better, and now I’m fab.

HW: That is you. That is the Jamie Hood I know.

JH: [laughs] That was never going to work because of the recursivity of sexual violence in my life. I was molested when I was a kid, I had a very torturous teenage sexual life, and that all happened years before the three rape events around which the book is oriented, two of which happened when I was in grad school in Boston, one of which happened not too long after I moved to New York. I moved because I hated Boston and I hated my program, but I was also running from what happened to me. I drank and did drugs in grad school, but was essentially orienting towards professional life. Then I came to New York and went full party girl mode, taking on a new persona. It was fun and strange but also really bad for me in ways I wasn’t recognizing, very self-destructive. And then I got raped again and saw the bottom. The three-act narrative arc of getting over trauma just didn’t fit. It’s not to say I don’t understand why those narratives exist. I think for a lot of people rape is anomalous, you know? I didn’t have a normal life. I don’t think I’ve ever really had one. Right now is the closest I’ve ever come to having peace in my little kingdom.

HW: [glances at Olive, dozing beside her]

JH: That question of honesty has a lot to do with how I tell the story, why I don’t tell it straight, formally speaking.

HW: You use form to emphasize the psychological impact that sexual trauma can have on a person, starting with the autofictional first chapter told in a close third person. It’s quite literally dissociated in terms of you writing about your life in the months after having been raped, and also the character pops in and out of consciousness. Then you move on to the first person in the next chapter, and then there’s the section where you’re excavating your diaries from right after you moved to Brooklyn following another rape event, writing to your past self in the second person. That narrative choice really spoke to the ways in which sexual trauma can erase one’s memory, like without this record for you to refer to, poring over it anthropologically, you wouldn’t really remember what happened on a day-to-day basis at this time.

JH: That’s part of why conventional imaginings of rape narratives feel so foreign. There’s this popular idea that if a traumatic event happens to you, it must be so unusual and shocking that you’d remember everything about it. I was dosed with GHB for two of those events! And it absolutely fucked with my memory. This idea that the shock of violence would render you more present… Maybe that’s true for some, but isn’t it just as reasonable that you might split off from your body?

HW: Especially if that event isn’t some anomalous thing that puts your life on hold. Your life, as you write it, is very clearly one that you can’t pause for any reason. You had to continue your grad program, you had to keep working—at a bar where you risked seeing one of your rapists, even. You had to keep going because if you didn’t, you wouldn’t have somewhere to live.

JH: Well, I didn’t have somewhere to live. [laughs] I was in survival mode. Precarity impacts how you assimilate trauma into your life. I had bills to pay. I was living on a friend’s couch. I had Olive. I had no fucking money. I was still doing sex work. The way these things transpire are classed, you know? It’s a class issue. The myth that there’s a perfect rape victim, you see it in movies and TV. She’s going to be straight. She’s going to be upper-middle class. If she’s an adult, she’s going to be married and have kids. She’s always going to be a proper representative of womanhood within the status quo. But, of course, in reality it doesn’t matter who you are. People are going to blame you. That’s partly why I wrote the last chapter as a sort of therapy diary, documenting our weekly sessions. I had to be honest about my bad behavior. I could’ve tried to tidy my loose threads and be like, “No, I was actually a good candidate for sympathy,” but like—not to blame myself—I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t getting blackout drunk all the time. I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t doing blow. I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t fucking all these guys to determine if I was a person or not. Those things happened, and that was how I responded to a lifetime of violence. I didn’t respond to it well. The world hated me, men hated me and treated me like garbage, so I treated myself like garbage. I had to be honest about all of that because yes, I behaved in these ways, and it still doesn’t mean I deserved what happened to me. I had to figure out how to not have shame about my chaotic responses.

HW: With that final section where you bring in your therapist, Helen, I found that choice so interesting since your previous work, how to be a good girl, was so focused on your relationship to men and their desire for you. I love that you chose to involve another woman as your interlocutor for that final section of Trauma Plot—that it’s another woman who believes your testimony and sees you for who you are so that, in writing this chapter, you’ve proven yourself able to do that without her.

JH: I hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but that last chapter really is my “woman” section. Olive is very present in it. You're very present. Charlotte, too. It’s all the important bitches in my life.

HW: The we-mun. When I first met you, one of the first things I learned about you was that you were working on this sprawling book of poetry called Rape Girl, which later became Trauma Plot. You mention it in how to be a good girl, saying something like “I’ve written a hundred pages of my rape book, and I’ll never finish…” So, yeah… Egg on your face…

JH: Egg on my face. I finished it. Period.

HW: Why did you think you were never going to finish it?

JH: I started writing it after the Access Hollywood tapes came out, and kept writing and writing. It seemed there’d be no end, but three things happened. One was, my agent said, “Jamie, sell the book or you’ll never finish it,” which like, OK. Period. Second, I got into a healthy relationship, and—whatever I have to say about how things ended, I was finally in a place where I felt I was lovable, and able to see there actually were men who weren’t going to try to kill me. And then I got into therapy. Without those shifts, I probably would’ve kept working on the book forever. I think part of me thought if I didn’t write it, I’d never write anything else—and that was a horrible possibility. The book became a kind of hairshirt.

HW: Jamie loves saying “hairshirt.”

JH: So this other part of me—

HW: She also loves “imbricated.” And “patina.” And “muck.”

JH: I love saying “muck”?

HW: I realized it rereading Trauma Plot. You use it a few times, as both a noun and verb. I was like, “Aw, it’s one of her words!”

JH: I think I used it in the group chat today.

HW: “In the muck of it,” “muck about,” I love it. I love that you’re keeping “muck” alive.

JH: So, yeah, there was also this part of the process that was about tormenting myself, like holding onto something that’s destroying you because you become protective over it. I couldn’t imagine finishing it because I couldn’t imagine not being the “rape girl.” For so long, I was convinced that it would keep happening to me because it had kept happening to me. I couldn’t close the book on rape because it felt like it was going to happen again.

HW: Cut to you holding a copy of Trauma Plot, literally shutting it closed.

JH: [laughs]

HW: The title change also feels so symbolic, from Rape Girl to Trauma Plot. You go from being, existentially, the girl who gets raped to something more metatextually distant. It’s—

JH: A plot.

HW: Yeah, and you’re its author.

Olive Hood: [sneezes]

HW: Bless you, Olive.

JH: My sneezy girl. Earlier, you brought up the childbirth metaphor in how to be a good girl, and trans motherhood is such a central part of the last third of your book.

HW: Yeah, the final act is composed of five essays that began as a 1,200-word assignment back when I worked in a newsroom, that got killed after two rounds of edits. It explores a lot of questions that I was thinking about, even though at the time I had already been surgically sterilized.

JH: Was this post-orchi?

HW: Yes. Also post-boob job. That’s irrelevant to the story, but I want the reader to know that my tits were also fab.

JH: No, they need to know that. When you get your boobs done, it sterilizes you. Important medical information from two beautiful doctors.

HW: So, at the time I was thinking a lot about trans motherhood. I’d read an early version of Detransition, Baby’s manuscript around the same time that I got back together with this on-again, off-again boyfriend, and we were talking a lot about what our future together might look like. Even though I couldn’t have kids, it was interesting to think through this question of trans motherhood and the maternal grief for a child you’ll probably never have if you didn’t bank sperm or have kids before you transitioned. There’s a lot of writing about that, some of it wonderful, but I wanted to approach it from a structural perspective. Like, what are the barriers that actually prevent trans women who want kids from becoming mothers in equal measure to cis women? In returning to that piece for the book, it quickly spiraled out into what are now five essays because I wanted to write about my friends, a trans couple, who at the time were trying to conceive, and I knew that it would also mean exploring IVF and the ways in which cost and insurance access can prevent people, trans or cis, from accessing that care. But I also knew that my experiences with sterility and sterilization more generally, both voluntary and involuntary, were connected to this as well, but it just felt inappropriate to weave all of this into one single piece. Like, you know, as one of the most openly sterilized women in the world—

JH: Excuse me! All three of us [points to Olive] are openly sterilized women! It actually kind of devastates me that—well, obviously I don’t want Olive to have been a breeding dog, but I do think she’d make such a good mother.

HW: Aw, she would be. She learned from the best.

JH: Aww!

JH: Both of our books are very hybrid. You’re also doing autofiction, you’re also doing art criticism, you do the dialogic thing. Also, for the record, your hair looks so pretty.

HW: Thank you!

JH: On my reread, I was thinking about how funny your book is, and how funny you are as a person. It’s just such an organic quality of your writing.

HW: It’s really satisfying and gratifying to write something and just be like, “Oh, this is really good. This is really funny.” And then you share it with someone, and their reaction confirms it. This isn’t very profound, but I just like that. Some selfish part of me enjoys the prophecy of it all, like yes, I am as funny and smart as I think I am and the challenge that goes into not just entertaining yourself but also entertaining other people. I think I honed that skill a lot writing for the internet. I’ve probably blogged close to 10,000 things, most of which probably don’t even exist online anymore—sometimes as many as five or six posts daily, back when my job involved aggregating the news and adding my own voice to it. While doing that, I had to find a way to keep myself entertained and keep readers entertained, and social media basically gave me a real-time feedback loop to see if I was succeeding at that. Writing a book removes you from that feedback loop, so it’s been cool to see readers respond the way I’d hoped. And you! I think your book is so funny in parts. Rereading it made me think of Cecilia Gentili’s Faltas, another book about rape that’s also very funny. You have a very blink-and-you-miss-it deadpan wryness to your writing. Like, after the first two rape events, you move to Brooklyn and you say something like, “I thought I knew rock bottom, and then I slept with a Yalie.” And then five pages later, you’re like, “Just when I thought there could be no more salt in the wound—”

JH: I fucked a guy from Harvard! Yeah, I would never recommend fucking a Harvard or Yale man. Even the term, “rape girl,” was kind of a joke. Like, yes, I was the butt of the joke, but I do think there’s something to be said for someone who’s survived deep violence to have the capacity to express every possible affect. It feels essential for me. Like, again, the popular idea is that if you get raped, you’re ruined, but no! I still did things! I still lived a life! One of the main reasons why I insisted on doing my own audiobook was because that wryness, that dark comedy in the book—I knew if someone else performed it, they were going to lose it, or it would come off very maudlin and self-pitying. Humor is a way of protecting myself against pity. I don’t want to be pitied. I don’t want to pity myself. I want a full life! I want to feel everything. Laughter is very important to me. Joy is very important to me. I’ve talked about it with you since I’ve been dating, post-my breakup: “These men don’t make me laugh.”

HW: More people are not funny than are funny, I would say.

JH: Totally. Maybe to close, I want to talk about what it means to prioritize laughter and pleasure and joy in a moment where we’re facing eradication. Both of our books are coming at a moment where narratives about transness, narratives about womanhood and pleasure, testimonies about sexual violence are all being effaced and treated as if they don’t matter.

HW: I hadn’t thought about it in these terms before, but I do think in some ways it’s a refusal of any predetermined terms of engagement with these subjects. Like, if I were to eliminate humor from my writing about transness and the legislative assault on trans life, I would be denying my own perspective and narrowing my scope so that it would only exist in response to those attacks. I didn’t write this book in response to Trump or Elon Musk or—

JH: People who hate us?

HW: People who hate us! Do you want to have dinner?

JH: Yeah. I love you.

HW: I love you, too!