Review: Magical Trauma Porn (A Review of Magical/Realism by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal)

By Hugh Blanton

The woe-is-me trope certainly isn't new, but in recent years it has proliferated right along with the huge increase of people seeking prescriptions for SSRI's and therapy. Memoirs and personal essays abound with tales of trauma at a level far worse than any that has seemingly been experienced by anyone before (apparently because no one before had to deal with climate change and Donald Trump until now). Author Vanessa Angélica Villarreal keeps a framed quote above above her desk that reads in part: "Listen to me: It is not gauche to write about trauma. It is subversive." Will the next revolution arise from the therapist's couch?

* * *

Magical/Realism is Vanessa Angélica Villarreal's new essay collection. She details her lifelong experiences of trauma and the various ways she deals with it which of course includes drugs/therapy. In the book's first essay, entitled "About a Girl," she explains trauma as she understands it: "Borders are sites of race-making, nation-building, temporal dislocation—the loss of the real, derealization, and depersonalization. In other words, trauma as I understood it: the moment you lose your reality to someone else's story." Much like memoirist Nick Flynn, Villarreal's life has been one traumatic event after another. In the next essay she states: "Growing up in Texas, my identity informed every traumatic encounter with authority figures, institutions, teachers, peers, even family." She can never catch a break and this collection is the result.

 

Villarreal's father was a guitarist in a Mexican rock band that never quite hit the big time. She makes it clear where the blame lays: "Xenophobia, First-World—Third-World relations, American racism, language barriers, and white supremacy made rock en español a hard sell to Middle American audiences." Some doubt may be cast on this statement—the 2017 song Despacito by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee is the most streamed song in American music history. Villarreal also cites an essay by Silvia Moreno-Garcia in the New York Times that says these effects "subtly erases the efforts of an emerging group of horror writers... such as Gabino Iglesias..." In actuality Iglesias's terrible novel The Devil Takes You Home, far from being erased, was awarded both the Shirley Jackson award and the Bram Stoker award (and was more a crime than a horror novel, Iglesias seems indecisive about what genre he really wants to write in).

 

Villarreal said it was difficult to face her work during her doctoral studies in part because of the Trump presidency (she references Donald Trump no less than thirteen times throughout this collection), migrant detention, and white supremacist mass shootings among other things. Part of the reason for her lifelong depression, she says, is that Americans don't know her story, but she seems to exacerbate the problem herself by including sections of untranslated Spanish within this collection. One traumatic event she suffers—working as a maid for her boyfriend's family—seems to be self inflicted. She was humiliated by having to clean the family's cars while her boyfriend and his family played in the large pool in the back yard. Villarreal explains she voluntarily took the job as a maid, and she offers something like an explanation why, but it isn't clear at all.

 

Much of the book explains how she uses fantasy and magical realism to deal with her trauma. She's an avid video gamer and television watcher. Many therapists of course recommend turning off the television and getting outside to deal with depression and anxiety, but Villarreal has chosen this different tack, even going so far as to attend a Game of Thrones fan convention to tell actor Kit Harrington how he saved her life. (She changed her mind when she met him, saying it was too personal a thing to tell a stranger.)

 

In an interview with Chaney Hill in Southern Review of Books, Villarreal describes herself as a single mother living below the poverty line. It's easy to imagine her addiction to video games and television leaves little time for productive work. This is why depression is sometimes described as a disease of the rich—poor people are too busy working for rent money to lie around depressed in front of a television screen. She also says in the interview: "I know we're all sick of trauma narratives, but I hope to present new ways to think about trauma as a collective, shared experience that can move us to imagine something better together and fight for a better world—the fantasy of a world without prisons, borders, homelessness, and violence." (Her childlike fantasies make no mention of what to do with the Richard Ramirezes and Dennis Raders of the world once the prisons are shut down.)

 

A good bit of the book is You think you got it bad? Listen to this! shtick. Villarreal says of her book, "The vast silence from borderlands voices across the literary landscape, especially in creative non-fiction, cultural criticism, and memoir, makes the responsibility to represent overwhelming." She's obviously missed the excellent books in just those genres such as For Love of the Dollar by J.M. Servín. Tearing her hair out over Donald Trump and climate change is working well for her—she received an NEA grant in 2021, a 2019 Whiting Award, and the John A. Robertson Award for a First Book of Poetry for Beast Meridian. Trauma porn's good work if you can get it.

Hugh Blanton's latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5