Post-traumatic
Little, Brown And Company, 2022

Summary: To the outside observer, Vivian is a success story—a dedicated lawyer who advocates for mentally ill patients at a New York City psychiatric hospital. Privately, Vivian contends with the memories and after effects of her bad childhood—compounded by the everyday stresses of being a Black Latinx woman in America. She lives in a constant state of hypervigilant awareness that makes even a simple subway ride a heart-pounding drama.
For years, Vivian has self-medicated with a mix of dating, dieting, dark humor and smoking weed with her BFF, Jane. But after a family reunion prompts Vivian to take a bold step, she finds herself alone in new and terrifying ways, without even Jane to confide in, and she starts to unravel. Will she find a way to repair what matters most to her?

A debut from a stunning talent, Post-traumatic is a new kind of survivor narrative, featuring a complex heroine who is blazingly, indelibly alive. With razor-sharp prose and mordant wit, Chantal V. Johnson performs an extraordinary feat, delivering a psychologically astute story about the aftermath of trauma that somehow manages to brim with warmth, laughter, and hope.

Praise: “A brutally funny and poignant debut. … Dark humor is another coping mechanism for Vivian, which Johnson deploys with tremendous skill. … Throughout, Vivian’s confrontational interactions feel achingly true to life. This is revelatory and powerful.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“The deep anxieties that permeate Post-traumatic are the other side of the class ascendency that many millennials of color navigate as we square our routinely chaotic lives with memories of go-go ’80s and ’90s years that instilled in us implausible fantasies of ‘the good life.’ ”  —Vulture, Most Anticipated Books of Spring