How to Be a Good Girl: A Miscellany

by Jamie Hood

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

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 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.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Essays, Memoir, LGBT, Feminism, Queer

176 pages, Paperback

First published December 8, 2020

Reviews

[Arabelle Sicardi]

This is soooooooooo goooooooooooood

[makayla]

first true 5 star of 2025???

[Femke Zwiep]

all i ever know in this life is if i am moved

what a way to get to know someone

[Vanessa]

I find it hilarious that one review characterized this book as "borderline pornographic with ejaculate flying everywhere", when in reality, the book is a nuanced examination of "goodness" as a learned construct. One that dictates the boundaries of desire, speech and physical presence.
It thrives in the gray areas, documenting how our survival mechanisms often evolve into limitations, and proving that self-knowledge is not always synonymous with freedom.

Jamie Hood deconstructs the "Good Girl" archetype, seeing it less as a passive patriarchal cage and more as an active performance opted into for protection. She challenges the literary obsession with violence as a character-defining moment, arguing instead that it is a "narrative refusal". Ultimately, she refuses to perform the "triumph over tragedy" trope, denying a cis-het audience the satisfaction of a sanitized or perfect healing process.

To describe this text as "borderline pornographic" is, as I've said, hilarious, but it’s also a damning indictment of your own reading comprehension. While the fragmented prose may not be for everyone, dismissing the book as something "written for men" simply because of the author's background in sex work is perhaps the most reductive and tragic misinterpretation possible.

[Dylan]

4.5

A beautiful voice, perhaps best described as poetic diaries? I can’t say I fully comprehended each line but this is a wonderfully inventive and touching work.
It blurs the lines of genre effortlessly and I felt a deep emotional pulling throughout.

Hood is able to mix together a swirling mass of confusion regarding womanhood, breakups, sex work, and love into a neat package full of erotic and touching poems that seem blown to bits in their erratic freeform spacing. Deeply confessional, sometimes bordering social commentary in the theory it pulls from, and at times meandering in the best of ways that mimics the mind as it breaks the fourth wall and contemplates nature of the work itself.

This was an absolute pleasure to read and ruminate on.

[Lindsay]

I don't know what constitutes "good" poetry vs bad, but I do know that this collection spoke to me in ways no other poetry book has. I read it twice, back to back, because it was so good. It felt familiar, at times intense, beautiful, inspiring. I've literally been gushing about this book to anyone who'll listen.

[Amorak Huey]

My last book of 2020. It’s a good one to go out on.

[Liv]

a supremely good breakup book. just astronomically what i needed. 25/10.

[Ava Burzycki]

kind of unlike anything ive ever read! charming, devastating, and incredible in exploring shame and desire and shame and desire and and and

using the works cited as my summer reading list tbh...

[emily]

my best read of the year, i think. read this read this read this !!! (also something really funny is that the only negative reviews of this ie less than 3 stars are from men)

[Bianca Rogers]

Jamie Hood’s How to Be a Good Girl is one of those poetry collections that delivers a powerful impact in the best way. It breaks the conventional rules, which is precisely what makes it effective. Hood employs a stream-of-consciousness style that feels both raw and meticulously crafted. It’s messy, honest, and sharp, like someone telling you a truth you didn’t know you needed to hear.

What truly resonates is the emotional honesty. Hood doesn't hold back; she writes with intensity and vulnerability that makes you feel deeply. The poems are painful, beautiful, and profoundly human. If you appreciate poetry that defies conventions and strikes at the emotional core, this debut is definitely worth your time!

[Meg Frances]

Jaime's verse is both an education (this book contains so many authors & works I made note of to explore) and an invitation into her life/world. At times, how to be a good girl made me feel like a bad girl, someone who has just stumbled upon her roommate's or lover's journal/diary and has quickly decided to have a peak, carelessly thumbing through an assumed sacred space. But actually that's inaccurate as this book requires time to fully ingest. That this was all written and assembled during a global pandemic and while the author was under or unemployed is awe inspiring. A gentle nudge for other writers to just finish the damn book already. It is recommended you clear out a place for this book by your bedside for early morning mind wanderings or leave it your purse/tote bag for solo park or beach trips.

[Basia]

Jamie Hood opens how to be a good girl as spring opens a bud, "readying its loveliness," but not without acknowledging the often cruel landscaping such loveliness may undergo. "shall the poem delete its own production" is a question to which this book says no, and even absolutely not! Instead the poems live in a gnarly, knotty garden of girlness. The poems are naturally natural occurrences, speaking in numerous dialects of desire and fluent in each one.

[Clare]

GIRL💜

[Rachel Gilman]

there are some numbered lilac days

*Warning: this collection contains content related to sexual assault.

“i should like the project to be a mess as i am a mess”

An authentic unfurling of truth cannot be contained to a single genre. So proves Jamie Hood in her debut hybrid collection, which seamlessly moves from open-veined diary entries to astute literary observations, all in asking what exactly it means to be a woman. In unpacking societal conceptions of ideal femininity, Hood also inspects her own relationship to self, love, and self-love, forcing open the reader’s eyes, ears, and mind for the absolute best.

How did I get the book?
I discovered Jamie Hood on Twitter. I think maybe we follow some people in common like Rachel Rabbit White and Sophia Giovannitti. I definitely don’t regret it.

What did I think?
The collection weaves itself around the question its title raises: how exactly is someone a good girl? Hood defines this character as rather frail, a “commodity—a fetish in its fleshiest & most perfectible forms” that is dependent on asking and then doing what a man wants (desire is her “singular power”), whose orgasms without witnessing men are comparable to trees falling in empty forests and whose body can be “made reducible to…symbology; the moral form in decay.” Yet Hood is fascinated by her ability—or lack thereof—to mold to the type, valuing “nothing so greatly as the certainty of my goodness.” She doesn't entangle becoming a good girl with satiation of desire, but rather as a kind of legitimization of her personhood in a manner that’s “usual and useful,” something that would be worth perfecting in therapy if she could afford it, that might make her write “as if my mouth were full of mfas rather than dicks.” Broadly, though, the obsession is more tied to trans identity. Hood describes her transness as feeling “circumstantial rather than originary,” something that makes it easier for her to understand the separation of body and mind, though she would still “barter any thing to feel everything,” some small part of her believing perhaps she does need to fix something. “i have convinced myself each relationship failure is a failure on the level of my personhood,” Hood writes. “not what did we do but why am I unlovable this is; why am i i.”

This line of thinking bleeds into a separation of “my” and “self” that Hood upholds throughout the collection. She argues that we are “founded on fracture” and that “a thrill of purpose” can be found there. “every day i wake up & wish i would stop telling on my/self & go on doing it,” she writes. “i am writing toward a being or; away from my undone-ness each project a configuration of a me in utterable tapestries.” As Hood dreams of having health insurance and what it might be like to go to a doctor, she cares for her “my” and her “self” through her writing, crawling into bed and crying or finding a “good fuck to elaborate my personhood” when necessary. “i pride my self in the pleasures i earn,” Hood writes. Still, the solutions are imperfect. “i am a good writer but only inasmuch as i am good at writing about my small self.” She continues, “what is the opposite of a something that still somehow manifests…a not-nothing which is also a nothing.” Separately, there is also a worry about if Hood can really provide everything she needs on her own. “so at ease in taking control of my body when i most needed it, & so careless in anything else having to do w my personhood,” she writes, musing if it’s too much to ask from men and from love, if she will find someone who understands what she means when she says, “i think how in brooklyn what are ur cross streets is an erotic inquiry...my cross streets are wherever ur dick hardens...my cross streets are asking yeah? is response to my whimpers my mouth parts my breath catches on the hook of ur rhythm.”

Hood litters ruminations on love throughout the work, constantly willing “the body towards love or; something like it…[imagining] a good man joining himself to me before a god i do not believe in & people i sometimes do,” only to later reflect on how “every instantiation of love is a precursor to mourning,” and that often there was never love in the situations she remembers at all but instead, “an insinuation…which was only ever a haunting,” followed by a grieving not for the person who disappointed her but for the foolishness that he would not. Out of this realization also comes a confrontation of trauma. “rape has happened to me more often than love & there are days this appears me usual; also boring,” Hood writes. “every book is my rape book.” These experiences are harder to grieve than her lost loves because trauma “disorganizes time disorients & displaces us from the coherency of narrative,” a power that makes it easy to wonder “what is a beyond to trauma; is a getting over ever directional; a side-stepping across time.” As Hood untangles this understanding, it makes her desire “to know love which does not clever me in its outset as a future loss” even deeper, that she worries she could die without ever having been loved well. However, this fear resolves. Ironically for Hood, “in the process of finishing a book on lovelessness, longing, & loss, i have managed a rather strange thing i have fallen—unanticipatedly, quietly, quickly, wondrously—in love,” she admits, though even as she talks in the language of lovers and feels that immense, unique pleasure she’s craved, she remains in terror that her partner “will lose sight of me before we fall for one another properly & learn our way home.” “it is entirely likely there is more pain in future,” she continues, “but i have always been the sort of woman to live, even if stupidly, in perpetual hope.” It almost makes me believe I could do the same.

Final Verdict?
🌟 4/5 — Great

This is the first book I’ve read that addresses the pandemic, “a world in the dulled throb of need” that Hood illustrates perfectly. She alternates between doom-scrolling on Twitter and masturbating (“i am thinking i need to be touched & that it is more illegal than it has ever been”), declaring working from home “one more exploitation,” and admitting to feeling high all of the time through “the publicity of this collective grief its disorienting spectacle.” Hood has the ability to name all of the feelings we’ve certainly had over “whatever damned year this is” of “out-of-time time” and to criticize them astutely. For instance, she writes, “in a moment we have been denied the capacity to narrate ourselves in our usual social contexts...to make new worlds from all this pain, this cavernous desire, this collective fear...perhaps only a more circuitous variation on a contemporary obsession w productivity-for-its-own-sake,” adding, “revealing an aloneness which was there before always just spackled over in the obtuseness of the everydayness the mundanity of the just-my-luck.” The fact that she makes these points in a form that utilizes shorthand, crossed-out text, and question marks in lieu of dates exhibit just how trying to think and express is in quarantine, that is can only be depicted accurately in “survivable past-tenses.”

Hood also makes stellar use of references to writers who have influenced her, interspersing their quotes with her own ideas. “i am a perfectionist obsessed w the incomplete i feel the only writers i have felt intimacy w lately are those who are endlessly citational; who show their work,” she admits. This is particularly true of women, such as Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, of whom she specifically wonders how they would feel about their ex-lovers exploiting their deaths in their work. “i think i write an awful lot about women artists who killed themselves considering i am j a bitch whose depression does not manifest in suicidal ideation,” she writes before admitting that it makes her sad her books cannot love her back (aren’t we all…). It’s also endearing when Hood imagines how poorly Susan Sontag would’ve felt about the confessional nature of her work, if she will ever write about anything other than herself. Whatever Hood decides, I can surely say I will be picking up a copy.

Beyond the book
If you don’t want to take my word that this book is a must-have for your shelf, perhaps you’ll trust the folks over at Vogue , who interviewed Hood about the process of writing, specifically during the uncertain days of the pandemic.

[Erin Laura]

Wow, so I started this book a year or so ago, and couldn't get myself to finish it. It was all too sad for me. Beautiful and re-assuring and full up of very sad love, but I think it wasn't what I needed at that time. It reminded me of my own poetry too much, and frankly, like the girl I used to be in college, and living in New York.

I returned to it this year as a cheap attempt to make finishing my 10 book goal of 2024 easier. I was still in the first section of the book- where all the entries are half dairy/ half poem/ half prose. It was all sad gross sex and desperation and self-effacement. Girlhood as an impossible paradox. A making small of oneself. Stuff of many feminist texts but with a good sense of humor. Good balance of the sacred and profane and humanity and all that. Goddesses recontextualized, the writings of Woolf, and lyrics of Mitchell and Bush commented upon. Standard faire feminist subject matter, really. I understood it but didn't want to dwell there. Tide shifted in part II, a long poem which I loved. I found it had a more definitive melody which made it easier to read for me. It inspired me to write my own poem honestly.

Then the end came... the protagonist falls in love. And I find myself almost crying at my desk. Not to get all- 'things happen for a reason', but I kind of wonder if I was meant to read this book this way, stretched out over time. If I was meant to return to it when I too had fallen in love. I wonder if I would have felt the same way about its ending or not.

Either way, cheers to you Jamie x

[Alan Zhu]

It's a very self-conscious book, in a way that can be both frustrating and yet utterly beautiful. It does a very good job of capturing what it feels like to kind of just want to be your own thing, and yet to be entranced/entrapped by the systems we have in society - there's a particularly heartfelt moment as a writer where she talks about free verse versus formalism, and about how she appreciates the formal and yet expects that she might never write that way; and similarly, I feel, this is an underlying current about womanhood here. It's something I've been thinking about with relation to my own transness, to whatever extent that may be—I'm not interested in your idea about what it means to be non-binary; I'm interested in finding out how I am going to be myself. And yet, I can't help but return to how society views me, how I interact with society, how that decides or modulates (to whatever extent) what my desires are.

The book also emerges from this difficult questioning, the questioning of these sort of juxtaposed positions and the eternal soul-searching of what being a "good girl" or what being a good writer, etc. mean, into this beautiful ending section of a new hope and love. There's an earlier passage where Hood denies being a cynic, and I think it's beautiful that she ends the book here at a place where even in spite of it all we allow ourselves to hope, where we *choose* to hope and (after some meta-thought) *choose* to include that hope at the end of the book.

[Kelli]

How to Be a Good Girl is a raw, fearless, and genre defying exploration of womanhood, vulnerability, and self-construction. Jamie Hood fuses diary, criticism, poetry, and cultural commentary into a single, searing narrative that dismantles the expectations of femininity and the moral performance of being “good.”

Her writing moves with the precision of a poet and the intensity of a confessionalist. From personal trauma to philosophical inquiry, Hood creates a tapestry that is as emotionally intimate as it is intellectually expansive. The book’s reissue by Vintage underscores its continued relevance a text that still resonates with readers navigating identity, queerness, power, and pain in a post-pandemic world.

How to Be a Good Girl isn’t just literature it’s self examination in motion, a reclaiming of voice through vulnerability. It’s a book that speaks to those ready to break free from silence and expectation.

[Jellybean]

"The good girl should not talk about money commodities / she is a commodity—a fetish / in its fleshiest & most perfectible form / i am trying to unlearn my body in its variation as a use-value / unlearn my self / as a disposability / i should like to be fathomed as a/live"

"When i was a child i watched the disney sleeping beauty over & over again each dull week / & think now how the leigh variation makes explicit the tale's eroticization / of female helplessness— / in the tradition of countless folkloric erotic fixations / & think how that fairy story was always a narrative of rape— / how in some versions, the king impreg / nates beauty as she sleeps / & she is woken not w a kiss—but w the suck of her newborn's / mouth at her finger—pulling that terrible splinter / from flesh; breaking its untoward magic."

[Kara]

how to be a good girl is sticky, emotional, honest, and horny...really hittin all the big ones!!

Hood's first text plays with format using an almost stream of consciousness model injected with care and attention of a passionate writer's painstaking adjustments. The result is somehow perfectly edited and completely raw. I could absolutely read this text ten times (and I will) and come out with ten different experiences. Hood's voice is honest, vulnerable, and biting while grappling with everything from love, to rejection, trauma, change, and even bits of pandemic life, just barely allowing the amber to set on these preserved moments she graciously shares with us.

Jamie is kind and funny and so smart, and you should buy her first book immediately.

[Lori]

The writing was really beautiful and imaginative, sometimes scintillatingly brilliant, but the content was none of that. The title is tongue-in-cheek as our author is a prostitute who loves her work, loves sex, and also, in one essay, falls in love with one man. I read it over such a long period of time that I’m not absolutely sure, yet it seemed to me that she didn’t write about anything other than sex and the insights it provides about oneself and others. The book simply had no appeal for me. It was borderline pornographic with ejaculate flying everywhere, much to her delight. i’ve heard that prostitutes understand and provide what men like. Perhaps this book is written for men. It doesn’t seem to provide any insight into personal growth or anything else.

[TheCalloftheLibrary]

interested to see how this ages/is remembered considering its a quarantine project, something which simultaneously weighs it down and imbues it with greater urgency. mostly works. the diary aspect especially, the evocation and direct quoting of other poets/works/interviews/etc. reminded me much of the ellen bass collection i read recently; here though the turn toward joy, love-of-life is much more bittersweet and hard won (whereas that work occasionally tripped into cliche for me). it is in that tension at the very center of the work (and is the poet's conflict, insomuch as loving being alive when the world so often wishes to deprive her of it is a way to simplify it) where hood proves herself most capable.

[Ridley Zarate]

Rating: 3/5 y’all I was so disappointed by this one. She’s not a bad author and her writing style I think is just not my thing, idk, but I was really really hoping this would be better than it was. The formatting made my head hurt and it was hard to stay focused on it for a majority of the time I spent reading. There are a couple of poems I really liked in this book but most of them I had to reread to understand. Reading this made me feel like I was dumb or something. I don’t think I’m super smart but this actually made my brain hurt. Especially with all the reviews I’ve read of this book I was expecting it to knock it out of the park or however the saying goes.

[Anna Grace]

“to what extent is my need to be imagined as good merely a proof that more of my self is bound up in the attention of & legitimation by others than is usual
or useful”
(One of the many many lines I underlined lol - this was such an interesting and unique read)

First “cool girl” and now “good girl”; oh how we as a society love to limit a woman's agency and potential!!!
To Hood, the phase “good girl” can be both the highest form of praise and the most hurtful form of degradation. It’s so disheartening how many of the expectations placed upon women are derived from the eroticization of our helplessness.

[Toni]

Part memoir, part poetry, part literary criticism, Jamie Hood’s debut is a bold exploration of femininity, desire, trauma, and what it means to be seen as “good.”

This was an unusual read for me, mainly because the writing style is so different from the poetry I usually gravitate toward. And yet… I was completely into it.

Unapologetic. Provocative. So damn good.

What does it mean to be a good girl? And what does it mean to be bad? Is either one really good or bad?

I loved how vulnerable this book is. The grit. The darkness. The hope. It wasn’t an easy read, but I stayed through it all.

Loved this one.

[Claire g]

i loved this. i hated this. i read it in a day. it’s bad poetry (she’s a bad girl) also it’s good poetry (she’s a good girl). (“am i a bad girl; a bad poet—both; or; neither”) i liked the part about if her mouth were full of mfas. i liked the works consulted at the end. sylvia plath is a little too present & that’s part of the point. everything is a little too abstract & that’s part of the point. thank u jamie hood

[Ellie Watson]

3.5 stars! hm. i really loved certain passages/motifs (page 34-36… HELLO) and some ugly things were reflected back at me that i had never seen on a page before. I just wish it wasn’t largely propped up by covid-speak; much emotional heft was entirely negated within two concluding passages … not to say they weren’t lovely, but it was kind of like watching a beautiful painting be made and then turning one of the many colors to gray

[Krysten]

I did not understand a lot of what was said. The stream-of-consciousness and the formatting had me mystified, but I believe in Jamie Hood's work and did not try to remember what words like "teleological" mean; I just went with it. This book is delightful and distressing, and its existence fills me with hope and awe.

[Erika Walsh]

“anything may seem to have been an act of god/ if u are filled w enough need/ as i am” are some of my favorites lines in this book & speak to a lot of its larger themes abt desire & longing. I love the way outside texts are used throughout the book especially the parts about the waves by virginia woolf & ariel by plath. this is a very good book!!

[eleanor]

soaring, exaulting, achingly gorgeous. jamie hood i love your work very much and i hope you keep making it forever and ever. i should’ve done the double feature with trauma plot because instead i have the secret history between them and that’s really killing the vibe. i’ll do them back to back soon.