Readers are hungry for stories about trauma. But what happens to the authors?
In her 2018 debut, Eggshell Skull, Bri Lee recounts her entry into the legal profession while fighting her own sexual assault case. The book became a runaway publishing success. It also prompted an “outpouring” of correspondence – much of which involved disclosures of readers’ own traumatic experiences, often for the first time.
“It’s a huge privilege, and I am so grateful,” Lee says during a phone call. “It’s extraordinary that people take the time and care to share those stories with me.”
It was also intensely challenging. At first, Lee replied to every message – but the sheer volume made it unsustainable, and inevitably took an emotional and psychological toll. She only recently turned off her Instagram DMs. “It just got to a point where I couldn’t handle it any more,” she says. “Frankly, it was too upsetting.”
More and more Australian writers are having to deal with the consequences of sharing their story in the public domain.A scan of this year’s high-profile releases suggests an enduring appetite for writing that deals with personal pain – Bertie Blackman’s Bohemian Negligence, Shannon Burns’ Childhood, Janine Mikosza’s Homesickness, Shannon Molloy’s Fourteen, adapted this year for the stage, Heather Rose’s Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here, Jonathan Seidler’s It’s a Shame About Ray, Anna Spargo-Ryan’s A Kind of Magic, Grace Tame’s The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner and Amy Thunig’s Tell Me Again, to take just a few.
But after revisiting old wounds to tell their story, these writers then have to sellit. The question, then, is what the industry does with them next.
‘Trauma has become this kind of buzzword’
Memoirs about trauma aren’t exactly a new trend. “People can’t get enough of it,” says the chief executive of the Australian Booksellers Association, Robbie Egan, pointing to the phenomenal success of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1997), or more recently, Jimmy Barnes’ Working Class Boy (2016). “[But] I think we talk about trauma in a far more sophisticated way now.”
Part of this can be attributed to social media, where, according to University of Sydney creative writing teacher and bookseller Toyah Webb, “trauma has become this kind of buzzword”. Memoir also lends itself to more media promotion than fiction, through interviews and first-person pieces with clickable headlines. As Lee says, “it’s unsurprising from a commercial perspective [that] both editors and publishers are thrilled to find young people willing to tell those stories”.
But the journey from there is far from straightforward. “It can be retraumatising to have to relive the experience again through the editorial process and the promotional process,” Madonna Duffy, publishing director at UQP, writes over email. “Writers often find that they are on the receiving end of other people’s traumatic stories when they are out promoting their books, which can be very difficult.”
And for writers from marginalised and vulnerable communities, it can be even harder.
A flow-on effect?
Wiradjuri writer and academic Jeanine Leane has been aware in recent years of “a real trend and movement towards trauma and deficit narratives, particularly from writers of colour and First Nations writers”. Currently teaching creative writing at the University of Melbourne, she says, “There is pressure to produce trauma and deficit narratives from minorities groups at the expense of narratives of resilience and agency that readers tend to associate less with minorities.”
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Emerging writers in particular can be expected to perform to certain expectations of identity – an experience articulated in Jumaana Abdu’s recent essay, A Manifesto for the ‘Diverse’ Writer.
“[There’s] a misinformed idea that if you’re covering that kind of writing, then you’re really, really nailing it for diversity,” Leane says. To centre narratives of agency over those sold on titillation, mainstream publishing needs to “step back”, she says – to “accept stories that are driven by the community” rather than perceptions of the market.
Though exploring the darkest moments in the lives of their authors, these books also aim to tell stories of resilience, strength and joy, helping “more people who have experienced that trauma [to] not feel so alone,” Duffy says. “Any writer who addresses their trauma in their work shows extraordinary courage.”
With recent reports that up to 1 million Australians live with PTSD, and more than 2.2 million experience longterm mental health issues, the impact of this can’t be overestimated. While Ultimo Press publishing director Robert Watkins acknowledges that “a lot of publishing has used trauma for shock value” he sees a growing focus on emotional impact, rather than “centring trauma as something to shock”.
Amani Haydar’s award-winning 2021 memoir, The Mother Wound, explored her mother’s devastating murder by Haydar’s father, in the context of intergenerational trauma and trauma from war. Writing it was “gruelling”, the author and artist says; at times she wondered if she’d taken on too much. “But the outcome is a piece of work I can stand by,” she says. “[It] brought me a sense of closure and justice that I’d struggled to find elsewhere.”
Additionally, she says, the enormous public response to the book has been “incredibly validating”: reassurance her work “has contributed meaningfully to ongoing conversations about the impacts of gender-based violence”.
Before publication, Haydar made the conscious decision to set up support – through family and counselling. Lee, whose debut came a few years earlier, was less prepared.
“It’s not something I knew to anticipate,” she says. “I wish I had decided on more clear boundaries for myself early on … but having said that, nobody expected Eggshell Skull to be as successful as it was.”
The biggest issue was not readers’ stories themselves (which, she says emphatically, she feels honoured to have received) but what the deluge of messages revealed: the number of people who don’t feel as if they can, or should, reach out for support services – or don’t have easy access to them. “What made me really concerned as well was that I’m not a therapist, I’m not a psychologist, or psychiatrist, I’m not even a counsellor,” she says. “I’m certainly not qualified to give legal advice.”
Questions about support infrastructure also extend to the education sphere, Webb says. While she’s enthused about students feeling empowered to “go for the jugular and write about things like trauma”, she says more pastoral care and trauma-informed training is urgently needed – for both students and staff. “That needs to change at the university level, to make those kinds of classrooms entirely safe spaces for students – but also for the teacher.”
‘Commercialising someone’s trauma requires care’
Everyone who spoke to the Guardian agreed the onus is on the industry to develop a trauma-informed ethos, and to push much harder for a variety of perspectives and experiences at all levels. A superficial approach to “diversity” that stops with writers risks inadequate support from editors, publishers or executives – where a lack of understanding can lead to dangerous blind spots.
Haydar benefited from being able to work with an editor who “had knowledge about domestic violence and who was sensitive and open throughout the editing process”, and a publicist who gave her agency over publicity commitments. “This was very important to me because I am aware of the way victim-survivors stories can be misunderstood, co-opted or exploited. Having choice and being able to ask for questions in advance, for example, made the experience feel safe and respectful,” she says.
“Just as lived-experience has shaped public policy around domestic violence, I believe it can shape and improve the publishing industry.”
Egan ponders the “moral hazard” inherent in the publishing process at large. “Ultimately, the job of a publishing company is to sell books,” he says. “So … you’re commercialising something that is extremely personal. Commercialising someone’s trauma. That requires extreme care, and it’s a balancing act.”
“I’m sure that there is much more work to be done to consider how to publish and promote this work in a positive rather than titillating fashion,” Watkins agrees. Echoing Haydar, both he and Duffy point especially to the publisher’s role in establishing a publicity process in which authors feel safe. In Lee’s case, for instance, that meant having a publicist present in the signing line. “[That’s] something, for example, that my publisher does really well,” she says. “It was always really, really good. I felt very supported by not being alone in that space.”
The best advice to her came from Helen Garner, she says, on the subject of touring: “Specifically, that you have already been very generous in the writing of the book. You don’t owe anyone anything else.”