Post-Traumatic
2022 American novel
Post-Traumatic is an American novel first published in 2022 by Little, Brown and Company. It is the debut novel of author Chantal V. Johnson, and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. The novel follows an outwardly successful lawyer working at a psychiatric hospital who struggles with hypervigilance and intrusive thoughts after a violent childhood. Johnson wrote the novel while working full time as a lawyer. Upon its release, the book received mostly positive reviews.
Plot
Vivian is a woman in her thirties who lives in New York City and works as a lawyer advocating for institutionalized mentally ill patients. In private, Vivian struggles with the psychological aftermath of familial violence, which manifests in fears that she will be assaulted and many other symptoms associated with Complex-PTSD.
Levity in the novel is achieved through Vivian's darkly comic inner monologue and the character's relationship with her best friend Jane, a black academic with whom she smokes weed and riffs back and forth.
After a disturbing family reunion, Vivian decides to estrange from her relatives, going no-contact with them. Her decision is met with skepticism by her friends, contributing to her growing emotional instability. Following a public outburst at a wedding and a wellness check initiated by her family, Vivian decides to seek therapy.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Post-Traumatic” as 2022 American novel. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 2022 American novel. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q113581549. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2022.
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This entry incorporates text from “Post-Traumatic” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.