Outwardly she's cool and professional, but once the incident is resolved successfully, Vivian inwardly crumbles, and we soon learn that she's saddled with deep-rooted emotional problems. In the midst of consulting with a new client, Vivian calms a troubled teenager who has just slashed a nurse with a knife. I felt this sense of obligation to survivors that I had known throughout my entire life.A Black Latina lawyer represents patients at a New York psychiatric hospital while struggling with the aftereffects of her own past trauma. Can we stop with that language? So I did. She’s not haunted by the scars of the ravages of the wounds of her traumatic past. The only scars that my character has are literal scars on her body. No haunting, no ghosts, no wounds, no ravages, no scars. Not self-pitying, not overly sentimental. I have to make sure that I do it in a way that is aesthetically interesting, maybe philosophically interesting. It’s like I had been taking in all of your stories for all of this time, and now I have to give it back to everyone. It becomes something that happens to more people, so you have this sense of connectedness with other people who are all bound by this thing.Ī lot of this book comes out of that collection of stories.
That’s a wonderful way to start the process of contextualizing and later politicizing what has happened to you, while also minimizing the significance of what happened to you, making it less personal. It made me feel part of something bigger than myself, which was great for me. I felt like I had this secret knowledge of these things that are happening to little kids. I have a horrible memory in a lot of ways, but I remember every single abuse admission that I have ever heard in my entire life, and I felt like I was collecting.
But later, when I would tell the story to other little girls, they started saying to me that they had experienced something similar. I told them about the violent situation that we had just escaped, and no one made any admissions to me that night. I had just moved to a new town and made some new girlfriends. The first time I did that, I remember it was at night. Eventually, I escaped that situation, and one of the first things that I did was start telling little girls what I had experienced. From a very early age, I knew that I was hated and despised for reasons that were a mystery to me. Johnson: I grew up in a household that was very violent when I was a kid. Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!Ĭhantal V. Her debut novel, Post-Traumatic, is out now from Little, Brown.
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