Think the most obviously sexualized and violent description - the one you know could only have been written by a man with the most elementary disdain for women- and then multiply that by ten. Rarely have I been given the privilege to read such violently mysoginistic crap. She had me in stitches the whole way through, even as I myself occasionally recoiled from just how much of our collective ass she was putting on display. Discussing the book with a trans friend in her 70s, she described it as "a bit too 'not in front of the cis,' but in a good way."ĭetransition, Baby is about two and a half women, a baby, what it means to be a mother, and, ultimately, about the strange paths heartache leads us down. But she does it with such an unparalleled humour, honesty, and grace that one cannot fault her. Torrey has written right into all the hardest, least comfortable, often cruellest parts of the culture war over gender, and nobody comes out looking good. There is hardly a page that won't cause somebody, somewhere to clutch their own personal pearls.
Discussing the book with a trans friend in her 70s, she described it as "a bit too Detransition, Baby is, like its title, going to be a polarizing book. This is one of those books I suspect will be polarizing, but I enjoyed it.moreĭetransition, Baby is, like its title, going to be a polarizing book.
indulgent is maybe the word I'm looking for, like, when you're in the groove as a writer, loving what you're writing, digging down into it, and you don't know where to stop. It is chaotic, well-written, deeply, gorgeously queer, messy, sexy, and it probes really interesting questions about womanhood, motherhood, fatherhood, queer parenting, the relationships we make and break. This I have mixed feelings about this novel. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel.more This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can't reach. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family-and raise the baby together? When Ames's boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she's pregnant with his baby-and that she's not sure whether she wants to keep it-Ames wonders if this is the chance he's been waiting for. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese-and losing her meant losing his only family. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.Īmes isn't happy either. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn't hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could A whipsmart debut about three women-transgender and cisgender-whose lives collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires around gender, motherhood, and sex. A whipsmart debut about three women-transgender and cisgender-whose lives collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires around gender, motherhood, and sex.