Writing Trauma in Crime Fiction

This is a brief post as I grapple with two very significant texts that inform my thinking about crime and trauma:

Erin Wunker’s Notes from a Feminist Killjoy is a book of essays and in these varied pieces Wunker offers moving and critically rigorous hybrid personal/academic writing. It’s a book that I’ve returned to several times since I first read it, and I’ve given multiple copies as gifts; along with Sara Ahmed’s work, it joins Irigaray/Kristeva/de Beauvoir and–perhaps oddly, in this company–Jessica Benjamin’s The Bonds of Love as my most important feminist theoretical projects for thinking through crime fiction.

And you’ll notice that none of these books are even remotely about crime, but they’re about adjacent aspects: love and domination; horror; constructions of femininity and female sexuality; violence and trauma.

Part of the challenge is that many of my texts are more literary than genre fiction: Alias Grace, Swann, Love of a Good Woman. These are crime fiction, more or less explicitly, but they are drawing on a different set of conventions and reader expectations.

And I’m adding one other book to my theoretical apparatus, as I think through the implication of Judith Herman’s Trauma and Repair. Her first book, Trauma and Recovery, was central to my dissertation project more than two decades ago. In the final section, Herman talks about survivors who develop a sense of mission, and that resonated with me personally and politically.

And then Herman’s work was disrupted by disasters in her own life.

This book, published in 2023, is oddly belated–which is so appropriate to trauma. Follow-up books don’t normally take three decades.

But trauma time looks different.

Here Herman makes a startling and crucial point: beyond recovery and as an extension of the survivor mission is the quest for justice. Trauma therapy rarely incorporates this as a goal, because justice has been elusive or impossible for most of us who have been affected by sexual and other forms of violence.

From the NY Times book review, authored by Christine Kenneally:

“Trauma is not just a psychological issue, [Herman] explains. It is a social one. Consequently, healing requires empowerment and engagement — the opposite of shame and silence. “Recovery cannot be simply a private, individual matter,” she writes. But recovery is complicated because the relationships of dominance and subordination that shape our society also shape the way justice is delivered. As a result, even the best version of our current systems of justice is often less than healing for survivors of traumatic attacks, like rape victims.”

And this is why in so much of the 1970s/80s/early 90s feminist crime fiction, much of the justice had to be meted out informally–more Dirty Harry than legal system. Especially when it came to crimes involving children and vulnerable women.

There’s a lot in Herman’s book to think through, so I’ll work my way through the implications slowly over the next several days.

A final quotation from the review:

“All survivors who spoke to Herman were ambivalent about wanting an apology. Many assumed it wasn’t possible to secure a sincere statement of contrition. Still, they thought attackers should be exposed to public censure, and for those in the workplace or religious institutions to be removed from positions of power. Some survivors proposed making rapists responsible for the often ruinous costs of seeking justice, as well as personal repair. One suggested that restitution be taken from her rapist’s paycheck, “like taxes.””

Imagine if we did that.