Rape, Revenge, and Writing

The book’s logic, we quickly learn, is that of revenge: the desire for it, whether to pursue it, and whether it is justified. Flopsy, Sarah imagines, desires revenge against her and Nathan for puncturing the dominant male order that he and Rapist represent. It is, perhaps, a little odd to target Nathan rather than Sarah, but it also fulfills a symmetrical narrative logic: Flopsy plays second-fiddle to Rapist, and Nathan, for the purposes of the rape story, is secondary to Sarah. Sarah, quite understandably, fantasizes about enacting revenge against Rapist. Her father taught her to hunt when she was a young girl, and she can therefore imagine the scenario with greater precision than most. Instead, she finds herself making small talk at department events with fellow students who have implicitly taken his side in their conflict.

Murphy, like Sarah, has a PhD in Religious Studies from a UC school, and she indicates in her acknowledgments that the book is partly drawn from her own experience. Specifically, she tells the people who “knew about the man on my back” that “it is time for you to carry yourselves.” We can assume that for Murphy, as well as for most normal people, revenge is merely a fantasy—something we encounter in movies and novels, but that we can’t enact in real life. In Notes on Surviving the Fire, Murphy deploys tropes of thriller and mystery novels to conduct a thought experiment about when revenge is possible or appropriate for a rape victim, who will not find justice through the criminal justice system.

Yet Notes on Surviving the Fire is not a straightforward revenge narrative. One of Murphy’s most audacious and complicated plot maneuvers comes when Sarah discovers from Nathan’s sister that Nathan raped a fellow student in high school, and his extremely wealthy family settled with the victim out of court. With this reveal, Sarah’s suspicions shift, and she now believes he may have been killed not because of his association with her but because of his own actions. The Nathan that Sarah believed she knew was, she now realizes, a story “in which we are both victims. The narrative is rich with complexity and compassion.” But Sarah’s understanding of herself, and her relationship with her best friend must now change dramatically.

Murphy’s novel complicates this question even further, in ways I won’t spoil. Throughout the novel, these questions of revenge and violence are informed by Sarah’s dissertation work on violence in the Buddhist tradition. In the very first pages of the novel, she teaches her students a parable involving Buddha confronting a problem of violence. Buddha finds himself on a boat with a man who plans to kill everyone else on board. Buddha doesn’t want the man to succeed, because if he succeeds, he’ll go to hell and suffer there. He also doesn’t want to tell anyone else, because if they were to kill the violent man, they’d also go to hell. Buddha himself is ultimately willing to kill the man, and take on the suffering himself (as Sarah’s students are surprised to learn). Because Buddha is Buddha, he has the insight and largeness of spirit to make these decisions. But should—and can—regular people take on this kind of responsibility themselves? 

Murphy’s novel is, on some level, a book-length exploration of this question. At the end of the book, Sarah reflects that Nathan probably thought she had chosen her area of focus as a result of being raped. “But I chose my subject matter before I met Rapist and Flopsy,” she reflects. “I studied violence because the world is violence, because I know violence. I studied violence because I am violent.” Unlike Rapist, though, Sarah is willing and able to control the violence inside of her, both on behalf of others and also to maintain a code of ethics she can live with. Instead of lashing out blindly, at the novel’s climax she pulls off a feat not unlike the Buddha’s.

As a memoir, Trauma Plot is necessarily less concerned with the mechanics of plot—or even linear narrative—than Notes on Surviving the Fire, yet it is just as deliberately constructed to reflect on the agency, or lack of agency, of those recovering from sexual violence. Hood structures her book in four sections, along with an introduction, each told using a distinct literary style: the first in a third-person pastiche of Virginia Woolf, in which “Jamie” is haunted by an ominous specter; the second in a more traditional first-person; the third in the second-person, in which Hood cites her diary entries as a form of investigative research; and the fourth, back in the first person, focusing on Hood’s sessions with her therapist, Helen, with whom she processes and analyzes the rapes she has endured, as well as other forms of sexual violence she experienced as a child and an adult. The book itself is another method of doing this work.

Throughout Trauma Plot, the obstacles women face in recovering from rape emerge like familiar, but no less horrifying, monsters: At a sexual health clinic, where Hood goes to get tested for STIs after being raped, a male doctor “prodded me with leading questions on my sexual practices, frowning and fretting, insinuating, by his tone, that I was some common slut.” Hood winds up sobbing, apologizing, and explaining she’s been raped—he’s the first person she’s told about what happens—at which point he “stammers” and tells her they don’t conduct rape kits. She later imagines trying to explain on the stand, at a hypothetical trial, that she had accepted a ride from her rapist after the event. But worst of all, the repeated rapes (as well as the sexual abuse Hood endured as a child) lead to both a sense of disassociation from her life and body as well as a sense of identification with the experience of violation. She writes, “I knew I was a rape girl, and I began to imagine being raped as a kind of vocation.”

It’s hard to imagine a more annihilating conception of self; a self that exists to be annihilated, to be violated by others. It’s no accident that Hood begins her memoir writing about herself in the third person, as though about a stranger, or that she later turns to the second person, addressing herself as “you” and examining her diary entries sometimes with distant curiosity, sometimes with puzzlement. The first-person “I” is a form of power, one that Hood balances with these more distant approaches to recreate the feeling of entering and exiting her own life. 

Through her narrative experiments, Hood not only shows the reader how the self can slip in and out of focus but also makes the case for writing as a curative act. “What if,” she wonders, “writing from life, this giving an account of oneself, was, in fact, the technique by which one composed a self?” The written word is more concrete than thoughts we hold privately inside ourselves—especially if that writing is published. But Hood pointedly avoids casting her act of self-creation as an entirely solitary enterprise by concluding Trauma Plot with a section titled “We,” focused on conversations between herself and her therapist, which she also records in her diary (which becomes this section of the book). In their sessions, they discuss not only Hood’s experiences but also this project and its role in her life, her anxieties about how it will be received, and wider questions about rape. As Hood tells Helen, she understands that writing Trauma Plot won’t erase the past, but adds, “I let myself pretend that by finishing the project and letting go of it at last, I could quite literally close the book on my rapes.” Writing this has, in some real ways, given her control over the narrative of her life: “I couldn’t keep men from hurting me, but I held onto my sovereignty in my ability to tell the story of those wounds.”

Helen is hardly the only person with whom Hood interacts in this last section of the book; she is also among friends, in a relationship that may be breaking down, and most importantly, intertwined with her dog, Olive, to whom the book is dedicated. These relationships may not be perfect, but they place Hood in a network of community—not a community in which rapists are tacitly accepted but one in which people give and receive care and attention. “I want to live,” she realizes. “Obliteration is no life.” Writing these words, writing this book, is the opposite of obliteration, another way to say “I am alive,” to reach out and connect.