NEW GLUE INTERVIEW: JAMIE HOOD

"I think I usually smell like a woman who likes to fuck."

Jamie Hood is a bartender and writer in Brooklyn. She's the author of Trauma Plot: A Life, just out from Pantheon, the hybrid pandemic diary How to Be a Good Girl, which was a huge hit, and “regards, marcel,” a semi-monthly, sort of Proust-y newsletter. I haven’t met her yet, but she seems like she might be an ass-kicker.

1) What is the first thing that burned you?

JAMIE HOOD: My early memories are nonexistent, so I’ll mention a sexy thing that burned me instead. Before it was stolen, my ex rode a vintage Beamer. When we first started dating, I liked to pretend I wasn’t scared of motorcycles, which also meant I left a couple layers of calf skin on his muffler because I thought it was normal to ride in daisy dukes and slutty tank tops. Lana Del Rey in the “Ride” video I was decidedly not.

2) What do you smell like?

JH: A couple months ago I did an aromatherapy course and built my own fragrance—cinnamon bark, juniper, gardenia, neroli. It’s very sensual. I think I usually smell like a woman who likes to fuck. I also finally bit the bullet and used part of my last book payment to buy a full bottle of Stora Skuggan’s Mistpouffer, which is a bit smokier and more unisex than I typically lean, but I just adore it and all their fragrances. Stora Skuggan: I will do sponcon!!!

3) What do you feel is more true: Every crazy person is a movie, every movie is a crazy person, or neither?

JH: Most people and movies now are basically boring. I don’t exclude myself from this. The social media age has flattened so much about life.

4) How does your heart feel?

JH: I fell in love again recently, so my heart feels like ground meat. I’m in the totally unhinged period. I float between tenderness, devastation, and nymphomania all day long. I have never been so porous.

5) What was it like to ride in your parents car as a kid? What about now—or equivalent?

JH: Rides with my mother were fraught, I think. It’s where every “serious” conversation happened so I found it all pretty dreadful. I’m almost never in a car now, and if I am, it’s a very rare Lyft, so it just feels like spending too much fucking money. Not to be grandma, but I remember when you could get from one end of Brooklyn to the other for $10 by calling a vaguely seedy Bushwick car service. Now it’s $40 to go two miles even if there’s no traffic. Horrible!

6) Does your misery love company?

JH: No. I have a bad habit of hiding away from the world when I’m in sorrow.

7) What does a potato chip mean to you? What does it taste like?

JH: I shouldn’t but I love them, so maybe what chips mean to me is shame. I could eat an Utz ripple chip at 5:30AM like a disgusting freak. Puffy, crunchy salt. That weird chemical-y oil flavor.

8) What does touching feel like?

JH: It used to feel like nothing because I was totally dissociated until I met my ex, but physical affection and tactile intimacy are as indispensable as oxygen for me now. My best friends and I will grasp hands for no reason at all. We hold each other often. If my boyfriend wanted to ravish me 24/7, I would be like, baby, why not 25/7???? Self-presence in my body is very new; I don’t know if I can articulate the immensity of it yet. I guess it’s what reminds me I’m finally alive.

9) Do you belong to and on Earth?

JH: I promise I’m not particularly woo woo but I am a very classic Taurus: I love good food and lots of sex and domestic decadence and being in nature. We’re the earthiest, most bodily of the earth signs. So yes, I feel that belonging deeply.

10) What is your first memory and what does it mean to your work?

JH: Like I said, my early memories are quite thin. I remember losing a doll in a snowbank when we lived in West Virginia—one of the only true snowstorms I experienced until I was in Boston for grad school. I remember fleeing the abusive household we lived in in West Virginia. The winding highways, the enormous U-Haul, my 4’11” mom behind the wheel. I remember seeing a dog get run over by an eighteen-wheeler. Maybe it’s not surprising my work orients toward darkness, but that’s changing lately. I want to write about desire and love and pleasure and connectedness. I’m bored with trauma.