The Fifth Wound is a phantasmagorical roman à clef about passion as a way of life. In one dimension, this is a love story—Aurora & Ezekiel—a separation and a reunion. In another, we witness a tale of multiple traumatic encounters with transphobic violence. And on yet another plane, a story of ecstatic visionary experience swirls, shatters, and sparkles. Featuring time travel, medieval nuns, knifings, and t4t romance, The Fifth Wound indulges the blur between fantasy and reality. Its winding sentences open like portals, inviting the reader into the intimacy of embodiment—both its pain and its pleasures.
Reviews
Something that’s been inspiring me more recently is Aurora Mattia’s book The Fifth Wound, which feels almost unclassifiable; it defies your expectations in every conceivable way.
Chocked full of winding, brilliant sentences sure to turn readers’ minds inside out, this is a tale of trans love and fantasy that engages with the full scope of the good, the frightening, and the profound.
Through a combination of memoir, mythology, criticism, and fantasy, Mattia attempts to capture the most ephemeral realities and absolute truths about life and love, transition and femininity through peaks of pain and pleasure—not by looking at the horizon beyond these passing sensations, but by traveling through them like a prism, using the transitional power of language to crystallize and shatter life’s most intimate moments.
In her new novel, Mattia reinvents the roman à clef with a magical realist memoir that puts the dusty genre of autofiction to shame. Sifting from multiple narratives—and dimensions—The Fifth Wound is a romance, a meditation on transphobic violence, and a speculative tale of time travel, ecstatic visionaries, and mystical union. Transcending the limiting confines of not just society, but reality as well, Mattia’s novel promises the reader an experience that recalibrates simplistic notions of truth and fiction, reality and illusion.
Mattia flouts genre conventions with a fierce debut about love, trauma, and the publishing industry’s gatekeepers. […] Mattia’s biting voice is undeniable.
Aurora Mattia’s cosmic, intimate collection of coming of age trans love and fantasy tells different stories of time travel, transphobia and knifings, and T4T romance.
A speculative trans roman à clef about an interdimensional search for love, agency, and freedom from violence for trans people.
I don’t know where to place Aurora Mattia in Brooklyn. We met at Bossa—we really met before that on Twitter. She told me when we were last together that she had reworked her book around the voice she’s developed on Twitter and OnlyFans. I like how contemporary that feels, even though there are delightful baroque twists in her book The Fifth Wound.
Aurora Mattia has written a strange, twisting, mythical maze of a book that centers trans loves and lives in ways that will thrill and delight you. Allow yourself to be transported.
The Fifth Wound, by Aurora Mattia. (Nightboat, paperback, $19.95.) Aurora, a trans writer trying to get her work published, narrates this dreamlike novel in which she reflects on past memories of love and violence and yearns for her love, Ezekiel.
Through a series of ranging lamentations, she reconciles fantasies of her own making or borrowed from other historical and contemporary lenses—with the often violently asserted limits she’s encountered in her own life.
But it’s almost impossible not to fall in love with Aurora, whose observations about the world come fast and furious, and it’s hard not to feel moved by her experiences with transphobic violence, about which she seems powerfully detached, almost numb.
The Fifth Wound, Aurora Mattia’s debut novel, is a book that defies categorization and convention: it’s memoir, poetry, fantasy, myth, lyric, epistolary, and so much more. It’s the story of Aurora, a trans woman living in Brooklyn, and her doomed romance with Ezekiel. While the book does spend time pulling at trauma and transphobic violence, there’s also humor to be found in the absurd — nuns and mermaids, fairies and erotic text messages — and Mattia’s writing is always sharp and beautiful. In the transfixing The Fifth Wound, the glut of story and form is the point.
a hymnal for fairies in love, girlprophets, collectors and hermits. Aurora Mattia has created a new world of language and insisted upon its arrival. I want to run my fingers across every word.
-Lou Barcott, Third Place Books
A profound confessional. There’s an immediate, deep connection between writer and reader that makes this one of the most heart wrenching, visceral experiences. Aurora is pure magic.
-Audrey Kohler, Book Woman
Aurora Mattia entranced me with this debut. It ebbs and flows, with moments of opaque writing, and tender scenes with a silky translucent shine. This book takes the traumatic and ecstatic moments of her life, her wounds, her loves and circles around them in romantic and stylized prose. Her high femininity and appropriation of a mythic self hit my heart. Mattia did what few could ever do when writing The Fifth Wound, I really loved reading this book.
-Iris, Room of One’s Own
This book is transdimensional! Wounds are portals; sentences break open. The narrator has a romance with a Siren; is visited by the spirit of Eleanor Rykener (thought to be the first trans woman in recorded history (ie. a police report)); sustains a knife injury in the face; falls deeply in love; makes meaning, makes myths. Excess is the key here. Maximalist fantasy is a protective gauze and the writing conjures magic of all kinds. A “challenging” read; not for everyone because so intensely and defiantly itself; will be beloved by and formative to many.
The Fifth Wound dazzles. Its idiosyncratic, genre-hopping prose is so dizzying, its kaleidoscope of cultural references so broad, you might simply come away with the impression of having read an unusual new talent spinning a multidimensional world full of mermaids, saints, and cum.
-Kawai Shen, The Whitney Review
The Fifth Wound is a maximalist combination of literary theory, autofiction and ruminations on gender and transition that are less gender theory and more prophetic vision. . . [Mattia] challenges readers to expand their definition of reality.
