Selling Our Grief
America’s appetite for the traumatized
“Writer and rape survivor Dominique Matti addresses the conflict over ______.”
My stomach tightened when I read it, the dek proposed by the editor of one of my commissioned pieces. Writer and rape survivor. Writer and rape survivor. So casual. Dominique Matti is a writer. She has also been raped. Her eyes are brown. Her favorite color is green. Her father was a fugitive for most of her childhood. She likes music. She’s a mom.
Since when has my trauma become an even remotely considerable descriptor of me? Why did the editor think it was pertinent to disclose in the dek before allowing me to self-identify? He did it to draw readers in. Because he knew it would work.
I watch a lot of reality TV. My husband and I have special shows that we don’t watch without each other. And while that leaves me all the bad shows to watch on my own, I’ve grown fond of it. Lately, I’ve been binging on The Bachelor. It goes against all of my politics, but some part of me finds pleasure in it. The other day, though, I was talking to my husband about it and said, “He sent the Russian girl home.” And he said, “Who?” And I said, “The one who had to eat lipstick when she was a kid because there was no other food.” It didn’t occur to me while writing those words that this information about her was…
