Diana Reid’s latest novel, Signs of Damage, explores the trauma plot.Credit: James Brickwood
Diana Reid discovered the hard way that some habits of home and heart don’t survive a move halfway across the world. An enthusiastic ocean swimmer in Sydney – she once wrote for this masthead about her love of the activity, a passion shared by characters in her novels– Reid donned a set of goggles and dived into the ponds of Hampstead Heath after moving to London two years ago.
“I was like, this is who I am, and then I learned very quickly that I have to get a new personality, something else to bore people with at parties,” Reid, 28, jokes. “I got really sick. I think you’re not actually meant to put your head under.”
It’s a fitting lens through which to view the incident, given how sharply Reid’s third novel, Signs of Damage, explores the stories we tell about ourselves – and those told about us. Thirteen-year-old Cass goes missing for several hours while on holiday with her friend Anika and the wealthy Kelly family at their villa in the south of France. Sixteen years later, during a wedding with the same family in Tuscany, Cass experiences a seizure at the exact moment someone falls to their death from a balcony. The past and present collide, as her seizures force a reckoning with what happened all those years ago.
Diana Reid, 28, moved to London from Sydney in 2023.
On the surface, the story is a pacy literary thriller. But Reid’s real target is the so-called trauma plot, which she argues is now so pervasive in pop culture that we’ve become blind to its presence.
Open your eyes, and you’ll see it everywhere. Plots where a character’s behaviour is explained by the revelation of a past trauma. Think Elphaba’s bullying in Wicked, Boo’s death in Fleabag, Arthur Fleck’s abusive past in The Joker and Camille Preaker’s sister’s death and mother’s Munchausen syndrome in Sharp Objects.
In her New Yorker article “The Case Against the Trauma Plot”, critic Parul Sehgal argued that trauma has become a reductive plot device in contemporary literature, flattening characters so they are no more than their suffering. Beyond fiction, trauma has been declared “the word of the decade” with pop psychology books on the subject flourishing, including Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps Score, which has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 337 weeks.
Reid was interested in how we’ve collectively absorbed the trauma plot – and how even well-meaning people can misapply it in their attempts to understand others. The novel also implicates us as readers, cleverly playing with our narrative expectations and assumptions.
Signs of Damage is split between two timelines, 2008 and 2024, that slowly collide.Credit: Jennifer Soo
“We need stories to explain the world we live in, and this particular story is so pervasive because I think in a lot of cases, it is a good explanation. Trauma can be formative for people and affect their lives in very complex ways. But I guess I just always want to try and impose a critical distance between the stories that we absorb culturally and then the way that we apply them to our own lives,” Reid says.
“I just don’t think that we should be applying them unthinkingly. And I think the problem is that when particular narratives become so pervasive, they then become difficult to talk about, and you lose that critical distance because you can just accept them as reality, rather than as a particular way of explaining reality.”
Signs of Damage marks a maturation in Reid’s work, but her exploration of whether trauma is the only lens through which to tell a story will be familiar to readers of her 2021 debut, Love & Virtue. That novel centred on two young women, Michaela and Eve, and their conflicting interpretations of a sexual encounter during O-Week. Reid jokes she hadn’t realised the echoes between her novels at first, but felt the novel was the natural form to question the act of narration.
“You always think you’re writing something new, and then halfway through, you realise that you’re just fixated on the same thing. Maybe that speaks to something in my psyche that some backstory could illuminate,” Reid jokes.
“I think that maybe that is the arc of most writers. They end up returning to the same thing, even though they set out seeking something else.”
Reid was 25 when Love & Virtue was published. She wrote it during the COVID lockdowns, after graduating from the University of Sydney with an arts/law degree. The novel became an Australian bestseller, winning both the Literary Fiction Book of the Year and the overall Book of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards. Reid was also named one of The Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelists. Her second novel, Seeing Other People, about twenty-something sisters living in inner-city Sydney, was released in 2022. The screen rights were sold for both.
While grateful for the success, Reid says her move to London has proved liberating. The sense of anonymity is as much a relief as it has been rewarding. Love and Virtue’s bestseller status hasn’t translated internationally, and Signs of Damage hasn’t yet been picked up by publishers in the United Kingdom.
“I think it is conducive to creativity because you always want a better position where you’re making things without feeling scrutinised. Oviously, when you finish the work, you show it to people, but you want the space where you’re creating to be really protected,” Reid says.
“And I think that there’s something about moving to a place which is new to you, and where nobody knows you, that makes you feel like you can write anything, and you’re not attached to a brand or something in the same way as, I think, where you’ve been working in one place for a while”.
Freedom from the pressure to prove she deserved her “extraordinary stroke of luck” has made her more productive. She now splits her time between writing at her flat in Islington, the local public library and the London Library. In the UK, she’s formed friendships with established writers– “name-dropping is so gauche” – some of whom have taken her under their wing.
“I guess I wanted to prove that I wasn’t taking it for granted. I was really strict about starting at nine and doing a full day and, even if I didn’t have any ideas, I would make myself write a certain number of words. And since moving, I’ve actually kind of relaxed on that.”
She has no plans to return to Australia just yet, and between novels, she’s freelancing and writing for the screen. And swimming? Still off the cards – for now. But as Reid knows, stories have a way of changing.
Signs of Damage (Ultimo Press) is out now.
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