Published in 2020
170 pages
Jamie Hood is a critic, memoirist, and poet, and the author of How to Be a Good Girl (Grieveland 2020). Her work has appeared in Bookforum, The Baffler, The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, Observer, The Drift, SSENSE, Bookforum, Vogue, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.
What is this book about?
how to be a good girl mingles diaries, poems, drafts, fragments, literary/cultural criticism, & love letters to unfurl hybrid interrogations of femininity, fucking, & surviving trauma. as the text journeys from the ice age to climate crisis & devours figures & texts as expansive as levinas, plath, the ronettes, after-school-specials, fairy tales, & the romantics (among others). how to be a good girl dismantles contemporary formulations of womanhood to ask: how far will one woman go in her longing to be fathomed as good, & what pound of flesh must be paid to live through this.
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The ambitious and experimental debut by Jamie Hood, author of Trauma Plot, interrogating the “good girl” archetype and the price one pays to embody it
In the thick of winter 2020, when so many books were buried beneath the catastrophe of the COVID-19 news cycle, one unlikely debut seemed to cut through the noise. Jamie Hood’s How to Be a Good Girl was an inventive and hybrid work of self-making, mingling diary entries, poetry, literary criticism, and love letters to interrogate the archetype of the “good girl”.
