{"id":35716,"date":"2025-03-11T14:31:09","date_gmt":"2025-03-11T14:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/2025\/03\/11\/the-trauma-plot-how-did-culture-get-addicted-to-tragic-backstories-diana-reid\/"},"modified":"2025-03-11T14:31:09","modified_gmt":"2025-03-11T14:31:09","slug":"the-trauma-plot-how-did-culture-get-addicted-to-tragic-backstories-diana-reid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/2025\/03\/11\/the-trauma-plot-how-did-culture-get-addicted-to-tragic-backstories-diana-reid\/","title":{"rendered":"The trauma plot: how did culture get addicted to tragic backstories? | Diana Reid"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Again and again, audiences have been spoon-fed the same plot: a character can only be explained by a past trauma, tantalisingly revealed in the last episode. Has the trope reached a tipping point?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/newsletters\/2019\/oct\/18\/saved-for-later-sign-up-for-guardian-australias-culture-and-lifestyle-email?CMP=cvau_sfl\">Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>You only need to look at some of the biggest stories of the past decade to realise popular culture in the late 2010s had a love affair with trauma. Online, there was the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.slate.com\/articles\/life\/technology\/2015\/09\/the_first_person_industrial_complex_how_the_harrowing_personal_essay_took.html\">personal essay boom<\/a> that kept websites such as BuzzFeed, Jezebel and Australia\u2019s own Mamamia afloat. In publishing, memoirs that explored the full gamut of human suffering \u2013 everything from the pampered (Prince Harry\u2019s Spare) to the impoverished (Tara Westover\u2019s Educated) \u2013 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2023\/01\/11\/books\/harry-memoir-sales-spare.html\">broke sales records<\/a>. And memoirs found their fictional counterpoint in novels such as Gail Honeyman\u2019s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine and Miranda Cowley Heller\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n<p>Our craving for tales of suffering arguably reached a fever pitch with Hanya Yanagihara\u2019s <em>A Little Life. <\/em>The 2015 novel follows 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 Belgian theatre director Ivo Von Hove was so faithful, so bloody, that when I saw it at the Adelaide festival in 2023, a woman beside me exclaimed aloud in the intermission: <em>\u201cWhy?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/newsletters\/2019\/oct\/18\/saved-for-later-sign-up-for-guardian-australias-culture-and-lifestyle-email?CMP=copyembed\">Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2025\/mar\/11\/diana-reid-the-trauma-plot-how-did-culture-get-addicted-to-tragic-backstories\">Continue reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Again and again, audiences have been spoon-fed the same plot: a character can only be explained by a past trauma, tantalisingly revealed in the last episode. Has the trope reached a tipping point? Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email You only need to look at some of the biggest stories of the past decade &#8230; <a title=\"The trauma plot: how did culture get addicted to tragic backstories? | Diana Reid\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/2025\/03\/11\/the-trauma-plot-how-did-culture-get-addicted-to-tragic-backstories-diana-reid\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about The trauma plot: how did culture get addicted to tragic backstories? | Diana Reid\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35716"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35716\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}