This blurb is from the SMH and it identifies what is wrong with much immature published fiction. It’s as if a whole generation or two have carved V for victim on their forehead. I don’t mind a bit of trauma in my fiction like I don’t mind helping an old lady across the road. But I don’t bloody want to be doing it all day. I’m going to read Love & Virtue. Who would have thought they’d be sex during O-Week? Shock. Horror.

“… Reid’s third novel, Signs of Damage, explores the stories we tell about ourselves – and those told about us. Thirteen-year-old Cass goes missing for several hours while on holiday with her friend Anika and the wealthy Kelly family at their villa in the south of France.

Sixteen years later, during a wedding with the same family in Tuscany, Cass experiences a seizure at the exact moment someone falls to their death from a balcony. The past and present collide, as her seizures force a reckoning with what happened all those years ago.

On the surface, the story is a pacy literary thriller. But Reid’s real target is the so-called trauma plot, which she argues is now so pervasive in pop culture that we’ve become blind to its presence.

Open your eyes, and you’ll see it everywhere. Plots where a character’s behaviour is explained by the revelation of a past trauma. Think Elphaba’s bullying in Wicked, Boo’s death in Fleabag, Arthur Fleck’s abusive past in The Jokerand Camille Preaker’s sister’s death and mother’s Munchausen syndrome in Sharp Objects.

In her New Yorker article “The Case Against the Trauma Plot”, critic Parul Sehgal argued that trauma has become a reductive plot device in contemporary literature, flattening characters so they are no more than their suffering.

Beyond fiction, trauma has been declared “the word of the decade”with pop psychology books on the subject flourishing, including Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps Score, which has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 337 weeks.

Reid was interested in how we’ve collectively absorbed the trauma plot – and how even well-meaning people can misapply it in their attempts to understand others. 

“… I think the problem is that when particular narratives become so pervasive, they then become difficult to talk about, and you lose that critical distance because you can just accept them as reality, rather than as a particular way of explaining reality.”

Signs of Damage marks a maturation in Reid’s work, but her exploration of whether trauma is the only lens through which to tell a story will be familiar to readers of her 2021 debut  Love & Virtue. That novel centred on two young women, Michaela and Eve, and their conflicting interpretations of a sexual encounter during O-Week. Reid jokes she hadn’t realised the echoes between her novels at first, but felt the novel was the natural form to question the act of narration.”