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The trauma plot: how did culture get addicted to tragic backstories? | Diana Reid

Again and again, audiences have been spoon-fed the same story: a character can only be explained by a past trauma, tantalisingly revealed in the last episode. Has the trope reached a tipping point?Get our weekend culture and lifestyle emailYou only need to look at some of the biggest stories of the past decade to realise popular culture from the late 2010s had a love affair with trauma. Online there was the personal essay boom that kept websitesincluding BuzzFeed, Jezebel and Australia’s own Mamamia afloat. In publishing, memoirs that explored the gamut of human suffering – everything from the pampered (Prince Harry’s Spare) to the impoverished (Tara Westover’s Educated) – broke sales records. And memoirs found their fictional counterpoint in novels including Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and Miranda Cowley Heller’s The Paper Palace. Even television and film were trauma-obsessed. Cue the detective who must face his own trauma before he can crack the case (True ...


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