How to Be a Good Girl

The ambitious and experimental debut by Jamie Hood, author of Trauma Plot, interrogating the “good girl” archetype and the price one pays to embody it
A VOGUE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
"An utterly compelling blend of lyricism, diary, and criticism that has become my go-to for invoking the brilliant trans-eye view of the agonies and pleasures of heterosexuality."—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby and Stag Dance
In the thick of winter 2020, when so many books were buried beneath the catastrophe of the COVID-19 news cycle, one unlikely debut seemed to cut through the noise. Jamie Hood’s How to Be a Good Girl was an inventive and hybrid work of self-making, mingling diary entries, poetry, literary criticism, and love letters to interrogate the archetype of the “good girl,” and the ideas of femininity, passivity, desire, and trauma that come with it. Journeying from the ice age to our modern-day climate crisis, it devoured texts as expansive as Levinas and Plath to the Ronettes and after-school specials, all the while asking: what pound of flesh must a woman pay to be seen as “good.”
How to Be a Good Girl was a critical darling when it was first published by Grieveland. The Rumpus praised its “bold vulnerability,” and Vogue named it a Best Book of 2020. Now, Vintage is proud to reissue this provocative and genre-bending debut and find new readers for an exciting, new literary voice.

JAMIE HOOD is a critic, memoirist, and poet, and the author of How to Be a Good Girl (Grieveland 2020). Her work has appeared in Bookforum, The Baffler, The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, Observer, The Drift, SSENSE, Bookforum, Vogue, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.