Vivian was giving him her spiel about his rights in the hospital. It seemed he lived on the streets but didn’t want to talk about his family or give any identifying information other than his name. The cops had brought him to the hospital after he’d flashed a couple of women in the park. Later they’d wonder what had happened twenty-five years ago.Īnthony was a tall, lanky Black kid, no more than fifteen.
“I haven’t slept well in twenty-five years.” The person she was speaking to would laugh in the moment. and, as usual, she hadn’t slept well the night before. Vivian was in the dayroom down the hall speaking to her new client, Anthony, when she heard the screams. As the nurse looked down in shock, Melissa ran to her room, where, after slamming the door shut, she proceeded to slice open both of the mattresses while screaming with rage at the pain of having been born. Melissa accepted, slashing the nurse’s open palm. The new nurse wanted to prove herself, so instead of getting a more experienced de-escalator involved she scolded Melissa, demanding that she “give back the knife,” while holding out her hand to take it. She set it down for a couple of seconds to hand Nicole a plate and before you knew it, Melissa was threatening the other girls with it. She brought a butcher knife onto the children’s ward to cut up watermelon for the kids as a treat. Johnson performs an extraordinary feat, delivering a psychologically astute story about the aftermath of trauma that somehow manages to brim with warmth, laughter, and hope. With razor-sharp prose and mordant wit, Chantal V. Will she find a way to repair what matters most to her?Ī debut from a stunning talent, Post-traumatic is a new kind of survivor narrative, featuring a complex heroine who is blazingly, indelibly alive. But after a family reunion prompts Vivian to take a bold step, she finds herself alone in new and terrifying ways, without even Jane to confide in, and she starts to unravel.
She lives in a constant state of hypervigilant awareness that makes even a simple subway ride into a heart-pounding drama.įor years, Vivian has self-medicated with a mix of dating, dieting, dark humor and smoking weed with her BFF, Jane. Privately, Vivian contends with the memories and aftereffects of her bad childhood-compounded by the everyday stresses of being a Black Latinx woman in America. To the outside observer, Vivian is a success story-a dedicated lawyer who advocates for mentally ill patients at a New York City psychiatric hospital. In this “deeply original” (Elif Batuman) and “violently funny” (Myriam Gurba) story, a young lawyer finally confronts her dark past so she can live in a more peaceful future.
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