Horror, Then Healing: Kyle Dillon Hertz on the Power of Facing Trauma in Writing

In grad school, we read Blood Meridian, and the class fractured into an infuriating debate on the nature of violence in fiction. The overwhelming majority didn’t like explicit depictions, but some argued that this was historical violence, and its unrelenting brutality happened. To revise away horror would have effaced history, disappeared the wounds that needed treating, and replaced an aestheticized frankness with implication. Who benefits from an aversion impulse? Not artists, not readers, not victims.

For a couple hours, we argued. Class ended. The three of us defending this idea smoked depressing cigarettes outside the brownstone under a starry lot on West 10th. I had just started smoking then, as a way to separate from my non-smoking soon-to-be-ex-husband.

I was secretly working on The Lookback Window then. The Child Victims Act had passed, granting a one-year lookback window for victims of childhood sexual abuse to sue their abusers in civil court, while I was in therapy at the Crime Victims Treatment Center, attempting to figure out if I would take advantage of the law, if I would divorce my husband, and if I would recover from getting trafficked as a teenager.

My ex-husband (a generally lovely, intelligent man) was troubled by the fact that I was troubled, which confused me, since most of my week was accounting for years of drugging and rape and the haunting minutia of being sold. I did not make the transition from wondering which rapist still secreted child porn of me to getting asked if I wanted to cook dinner together and walk our dogs with a smile.

My ex-husband had difficulty listening to what happened to me, and a harder time accepting the way that addressing such violence altered my days. Although this frustrated me, I understood. I had spent many years actively repressing the memories. I had been in and out of psych wards, been kicked out of rehabs, overdosed on drugs, and blanked out years with benzos.

I didn’t blame him for initially wanting to avert his attention, but I knew from my own healing work that the only way through was to look directly at what had happened. This difference ended our marriage, less than six months after our wedding.

I had been seeking out such encounters in my life as a reader before I was able to do this work in treatment or as a writer. My favorite author was Denis Johnson. His characters got raped and abused and shot, and he followed their attacks from encounter to wound to treatment, all while being witnessed by other people, whether or not they intervened. Most wanted somebody to “talk into their bullet hole and tell me I’m fine.”

In my favorite of his books, Angels, Jamie Mays leaves an abusive relationship with her kids and meets Bill Houston, an alcoholic veteran, on a Megabus. They part in Chicago. While Jamie looks for him, she gets drugged and raped in a horrifying three-page scene.

What I found hard to talk about in my real life or difficult to watch came easier in literature, which I now understand as a function of literature’s nature: every word is consent. Nobody forces a sentence into you, and the slowness of reading prevents such accidental triggers. This act of reading Johnson’s violent work had begun to rebuild an atrophied muscle.

I learned in C-PTSD treatment that the more you avoided what triggered you the worse the trigger became, and my therapist and I spent many hours detailing the sexual abuse, reintegrating the graphic narrative into my life so that it no longer had as much time-shifting, figurative power. Evading the graphic nature of rape had given what happened to me a figurative power with literal effects— flashbacks or explosive reactions or an unknown sense of dread.

I was no longer in danger, like I had once been. We just had to teach this to my body and mind. I needed, like a character in Jesus’ Son, to “Talk into the bullet hole and tell me I’m fine.”

This transfiguring evasion of explicit harm exists in Angels too. After the rape, Jamie finds Bill, and they trauma-bond:

They started calling it The Rape, and it came to stand for everything: for coming together while falling apart; for loving each other and hating everybody else; for moving at a breakneck speed while getting nowhere; for freezing in the streets and melting in the rooms of love. The Rape was major and useless, like a knife stuck in the midst of things. They could hate it and arrange their picture of themselves around it.

But “a knife stuck in the midst of things” isn’t really “major and useless.” Jamie loses her mind, turns to drugs, and her life falls apart. (Been there.) Violence isn’t a metaphor.

I hated what happened to me, too, and arranged myself around it. I spent many years lost, wondering why everything failed, including, eventually, my heart, once, after doing too many drugs, and the first police investigation, where I still wasn’t able to tell the detective everything that had been done. I got my second chance through the Child Victims Act, and through the Crime Victims Treatment Center, and through working on The Lookback Window.

After people started reading my book, I started seeing reviews from people who didn’t understand why the book was so explicit. Some early reviewers didn’t enjoy those scenes, and I thought: Great! They’re not really there for pleasure. But they are in the text to help people understand. As Dylan says in the book: “I want you to know a person like me.”

I’d heard from others that they had never really read a book that so acutely portrays what it’s like to be sexually abused as a child, as a gay man, as someone who was trafficked. I’ve heard from therapists who use the book, people in recovery, people who write to me to ask how they can find treatment like the one in the book. They hadn’t known it existed. Just like me, all those years ago.

I considered the novel a roadmap to healing, creating the graphic depictions of abuse and recovery as a necessary aesthetic and emotional condition. I wanted readers to know the physical and emotional effects of this kind of abuse, and I wanted anyone who recognized their own trauma in the novel to see the methods that I had learned for living with this history. If I had known that as a victim of crime in New York that the state would fund my survival through specialized treatment, maybe I would have gotten help earlier.

I had a dozen hypotheticals like this that I hoped The Lookback Window could address, for anyone who might not know what was possible. I hoped that a depiction of life as I knew it, even a fictional one, could help liberate others, as Johnson’s work had done for me.