In Jessica Jurassica’s second novel, an experience of violence has turned the protagonist into a kind of seismograph: what happened echoes within her and demands to be recorded. And the louder the present, the louder her past – so she realises when she becomes embroiled in Switzerland’s first major #MeToo scandal. So she embarks on a journey to get to the bottom of her trauma and reclaim her story: walks by the sea, trauma theory in New York and spiritual redemption in central Switzerland.

“Gaslicht” (”Gaslight”) confronts the fragmentary nature of memory. How can the nature of trauma be recounted? How can a text do justice to the violence that has been survived? To get to the bottom of these questions, Jurassica peels away layers of time and dissects patriarchal narratives. With its linguistic and narrative complexity, the novel repeatedly breaks out of the pop-cultural framework and builds on an intergenerational feminist foundation, by referring e.g. to works by Louise Bourgeois, Verena Stefan, Carmen Maria Machado and Tarana Burke.

In “Gaslicht”, Jessica Jurassica publicly addresses patriarchal violence and its consequences. As trauma researcher Judith Herman noted, trauma is a societal problem, so healing it must be a public matter.