The trauma plot: how did culture get addicted to tragic backstories? | Diana Reid
Again and again, audiences have been spoon-fed the same story: a character can only be explained by a past trauma, tantalisingly revealed in the last episode. Has the trope reached a tipping point?
You only need to look at some of the biggest stories of the past decade to realise popular culture from the late 2010s had a love affair with trauma. Online there was the personal essay boom that kept websites including BuzzFeed, Jezebel and Australia’s own Mamamia afloat. In publishing, memoirs that explored the gamut of human suffering – everything from the pampered (Prince Harry’s Spare) to the impoverished (Tara Westover’s Educated) – broke sales records. And memoirs found their fictional counterpoint in novels including Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and Miranda Cowley Heller’s The Paper Palace. Even television and film were trauma-obsessed. Cue the detective who must face his own trauma before he can crack the case (True Detective, The Dry); and the advertising executive who could write perfect copy if only he could stop running from his past (Mad Men).
Our craving for tales of suffering reached a fever pitch in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. The 2015 novel follows a corporate lawyer, Jude (named after the patron saint of lost causes), as he stumbles through a glamorous life in New York, haunted by the abundance of abuse he suffered as a child. A 2022 theatrical adaptation by the Belgian theatre director Ivo Von Hove was so faithful and so bloody that when I saw it at the Adelaide festival in 2023, a woman beside me exclaimed aloud in the intermission: “Why?”
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