Name: Dora Tominic's review of Detransition, Baby by TORREY. PETERS
Item: Detransition, Baby
Author: Dora Tominic

TORREY. PETERS

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2021

Detransition, Baby

Torrey Peters

A trans woman, her detransitioned ex, and his cisgender lover build an unconventional family together in the wake of heartbreak and an unplanned pregnancy.

A Novel

james cao

Your roommate wants you to do the dishes? Okay, but doesn't your roommate understand that your mom once worked as a domestic maid (for three months while on a break from college), and, actually, this demand to do dishes is a traumatic attack on your class status and upward generational mobility?

Funerals remind Reese not to kill herself. Not because she so badly wants to live, but because suicide as a trans girl leads to a mortifying posthumous stripping of all that you cherished by friends and strangers alike. If you are not there to stop them, the loudest, brashest, and clumsiest of your semi-acquaintances will scoop up all that was once you and simmer it down to a single mawkish narrative, plucking out all that is inconveniently irreducible, and inserting in its place all that is trite and politically serviceable.

“Yes." Reese nods. "I mean, they go through everything I go through as a trans woman. Divorce is a transition story. Of course, not all divorced women go through it. I'm talking about the ones who felt their divorce as a fall, or as a total reframing of their lives. The ones who have seen how the narratives given to them since girlhood have failed them, and who know there is nothing to replace it all. But who still have to move forward without investing in new illusions or turning bitter -all with no plan to guide them. That’s as close to a trans woman as you can get. Divorced women are the only people who know anything like what I know. And, since I don't really have trans elders, divorced women are the only ones I think have anything to teach me, or who I care to teach in return.”

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2021 As heard on BBC Radio 4's Front Row February 2021 Book of the Month for Roxane Gay's Book Club 'Irresistible ... Detransition, Baby is the first great trans realist novel' Grace Lavery, Guardian 'A voraciously knowing, compulsively readable novel' Chris Kraus 'Tremendously funny and sexy as hell' Juliet Jacques Reese nearly had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York, a job she didn't hate. She'd scraped together a life previous generations of trans women could only dream of; the only thing missing was a child. Then everything fell apart and three years on Reese is still in self-destruct mode, avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men. When her ex calls to ask if she wants to be a mother, Reese finds herself intrigued. After being attacked in the street, Amy de-transitioned to become Ames, changed jobs and, thinking he was infertile, started an affair with his boss Katrina. Now Katrina's pregnant. Could the three of them form an unconventional family - and raise the baby together?

sina (she/her) 

But we are a lost generation. We have no elders, no stable groups, no one to teach us to countenance pain. No matriarchs to tell the young girls to knock it off or show off their own long lives lived happily and well. Those older generations of trans women died of HIV, poverty, suicide, repression, or disappeared to pathologized medicalization and stealth lives - and that's if they were lucky enough to be white.

But in finding meaning, Rese would argue - despite the changes wrought by feminism - women still found themselves with only four major options to save themselves, options represented by the story arcs of the four female characters of Sex and the City. Find a partner, and be a Charlotte. Have a career, and be a Samantha. Have a baby, and be a Miranda. Or finally, express oneself in art or writing, and be a Carrie. Every generation of women reinvented this formula over and over, Reese believed, blending it and twisting it, but never quite escaping it.

"[A novel] 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..."--.

Helen 

But what if it was never about politics? Maybe she just always wanted what she wanted: hormones then and a baby now. A nimble mind can always uncover the politics to justify its own selfishness.

Krys C

If an oracle had foretold that Reese would voluntarily comeout at a doTERRA Essential Oils direct sales party, she would have understood it figuratively, a puzzle like the one the witches gave to fool Macbeth - because the literal possibility of a forest traveling up a hull existed beyond the realms of even oulandish farce. A doTERRA-party-coming-out is Reese's Birnam Wood. 

Reese's sense of her own gender does not allow her to make sports analogies, but like, Katrina is doing the thing where the guy who throws the ball does so with no spin whatsoever. 

Her? She's like Starbucks- any idiot can enjoy her and, two hours later, forget he did. 

Jealousy is like a hangover: when you are in the midst of it you want to die, you are poisoned, useless. Nothing stretches before you but an expanse of ashes and regret; yet despite the intensity of your suffering, no one feels sorry for you, no one cosigns your fury. No sympathy for you! Look how wantonly you indulged! Of course it hurts, but your suffering is nothing unique, everyone has suffered like that, so get ahold of yourself, show some backbone and discretion, for God's sake.  Don't go making any major decisions. Jealousy and hangovers, as common wisdom goes, are temporary 

But torture is temporary too, and torture nonetheless breaks its victims. The poor guys on the lowered end of a CIA waterboard wouldn't confess if it were possible to tell themsleves that, actually, this drowning is merely temporary. 

Of course, she told herself, the flow of time and the epochs that add up to a queer life won't correspond n the timeline or even sequence of straight lives, so it is meaningless to compare her own queer lifeline to a heterosexual's lifeline as though they were horses on the same racetrack, released from the gates at the same moment. And that was just for your run-of-the- mill queer. Now imagine that you were trans! You would have to go through at least two puberties! By age thirty, the financial ads said. you should have saved two years' income for retirement. But at age thirty, the trans girls Reese knew held most of their investment portfolios in the formn of old MAC lipstick shades they' d worn once; they spent workdays sending each other animated gifs and occa- sionally got trolled online by actual thirteen-year-olds.

It's like coming home, that quick "girl." Something warmer and sweeter than the spring sun heating his neck and the ice cream lin- gering on his tongue. It's scary-seductive, emphasis on scary. Start looking for that kind of comfort and he's bound to make a fool of himself.

Connie Meade

Caroline

Still slowly getting accustomed to audiobooks. I guess good but I had a huge pause between 1st and 2nd half of the book that maybe it doesn't even count as read.

Dora Tominic

Disclaimer: this is not a review.

Still slowly getting accustomed to audiobooks. I guess good but I had a huge pause between 1st and 2nd half of the book that maybe it doesn't even count as read.

This book is really great. I experienced a full range of emotion in tandem with the characters who felt so real and relatable. So many times I wanted to grab them by the shoulders and shake them and tell them what was glaringly obvious to me, the reader. Peter’s’ writing style is amazing and the decision to split chapters as pre- and post- conception was a) fantastic non-linear storytelling and b) positively gut wrenching at times

Ryan Mateyk

3.5 stars. I enjoyed this as a queer character study and for the perspectives on trans womanhood but I struggled with the writing unfortunately.

This was a wild one! I was initially not impressed, but I found myself very invested about three quarters of the way through. I think Ames/Amy is a good emotional cornerstone for the story Peters wanted to tell and she does a great job building tension between the point of view characters in a way that helped me overcome the honestly meh dialogue (very millennial turns of phrase all the time from everyone). The "Sex in the City" motif felt appropriate because really that's what this is--Sex in the City for white transgender women. 

Alex 

carly smallbird

I enjoyed this book but also the characters really stressed me out. Cuts close to the bone, so if you're into that, this book is for you.

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • “An unforgettable portrait of three women, trans and cis, who wrestle with questions of motherhood and family making . . . Detransition, Baby might destroy your book club, but in a good way.”—Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl “A tale of love, loss, and self-discovery as singular as it is universal, and all the sweeter for it.”—Entertainment Weekly Longlisted for the Women’s Prize • Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club Pick • A Marie Claire Book Club Pick 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 only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men. Ames isn't happy either. 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. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. 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. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family—and raise the baby together? This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can't reach. 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.

Lindy

The title was the best part.

You know that tide of books about quirky thirtysomethings who live in New York City, work in advertising, attend random galas while broke, and whose main hobby is having gender-affirming masochistic sex? Yeah,  Detransition, Baby is one of those. Except in this one the characters also natter on about how divorce is a transition narrative, and I was like, okay so show me through narrative and they never did and instead they moved on to talking about gentrifying HIV. I'm not trying to be glib; those are the phrases the author uses. I was just so annoyed by the end.

It was also a frustrating read for me because there are some good chunks of character writing buried in there. I could almost feel 3-4 good short stories struggling to be liberated from each other and everything else.

Explores the collective and individual experience of queerness, and a story I hadn't heard before.

g.m.

mic shulman

Meagan Fischer 

I think a big part of why this book is appealing and noteworthy is because it is unique in what the author sets out to do. She reveals aspects of the darker side of the queer and trans subcultural scene, in ways that I think many trans activists would be unwilling to do for fear of undermining their cause. It was refreshing to me as a queer person who has had bad experiences with other trans and queer people to see truths being told about the negative aspects of this subculture. 

At the same time, the story was humanizing, especially to one of the three main characters (there were attempts made with the other two, but one of them shone through as most developed in my opinion - perhaps the one the author identified with the most?). In this story, there were no bad people or one dimensional bigots (at least as far as I recall - if there were, they passed through quickly as setting rather than characters). Even characters who might be dismissed as unimportant or antagonistic were given some amount of depth, and various perspectives were given voice. 

As I write this I think about how authors of certain less common - or less commonly published - identities are at times expected to be the voice for those communities, and I imagine there is that pressure on Torrey Peters, especially with the subject matter she chose. I'm not sure there is any way out of this. What I can say is that despite this novel surely carrying the extra weight of being "representational," and therefore running the risk of tokenization, Peters writes with a unique voice that I was glad to hear. 

This is especially true for me as someone who once identified as a trans ally, but due to a variety of experiences with trans activism, has become more skeptical and cautious. It was relieving to get some insight into the trans feminine experience that was more vulnerable and three-dimensional, rather than the sound bytes and oversimplification in online tweets and think pieces.

Lamia Hajani

Detransition, Baby was the first book I've read by a trans woman about being a trans woman. The novel is full of messiness, love, pointed observations and realness - I really appreciated all of it. 

Reese is a trans woman who lives in New York and has sex with married men who fetishize trans women. All Reese has ever wanted is to be a mother; so when she gets a call from Ames, her ex who "detransitioned" from Amy proposing a viable path to motherhood for her, she is intrigued. Enter Katrina, Ames' boss who is pregnant with said baby. Katrina is mixed, half-Chinese half-white and she is decidedly heterosexual.

There is a journey throughout this book. It doesn't really feel like a book with a beginning, middle and end. It feels like you're reading about a real thing that happened to real people, and I appreciate that. This is my first foray with Peters' writing, and I enjoyed her writing style. I think she addressed a lot of major points - the difference between being a trans woman and a trans woman of color, the parallels between certain cis women and trans women and the way that straight people often feel they empathize and understand but can rip the rug from right out underneath queer folks. Katrina, as a character, is not my favorite because of the way she conflates her own experiences with being a trans woman - they are not the same, especially because she is white-passing. I think Peters does a great job of writing Reese as a character you sympathize with, while maybe understanding why she can be so self-destructive.

I give this novel 4 stars. It loses a star because it was a bit long-winded in some places, and I found myself losing interest here and there. Still, Peters strung together an amazing #OwnVoices story that needed to be told.

Thank you very much to NetGalley, Torrey Peters and Random House Publishing Group for providing me with an ARC to review this book. Buy Detransition, Baby now!

just insane but kinda was so important for me in my first year of transition

eris

Lisa Lindquist 

Derek

very important but the third quarter felt a bit weak compared to the rest

Erin Jensen

I am certainly better for reading this book. It was a deeply honest and unparalleled humorous book that took a look into the culture war that surrounds gender and sexuality. This story is about 2.5 women and a pregnancy, and let me tell you…pearls were clutched! I found myself giggling with the character dialogue, but at the same time heartbroken over the polarizing and layered emotions a transgendered person feels when confronting societal issues that have long been divided by how men versus women confront said issues.

Meghan Navoy

The first half of this I didn't like at all and I thought I would give up. Multiple people recommended this to me and so I thought I'd try a little bit more to get into it. I ended up getting sort of into it halfway through and then it continued to drag on and I powered through to the disappointing lackluster end

Abiiii

What happens when a de-transitioned Ames, whose sense of parenthood is inextriacbly tied to his former partner Reese, knocks up his boss Katrina? A mess, mostly.

This book goes into the beauty of complicated relationships, the pain of heartbreak, and really pours all of its love into its treatment of queer and trans-ness. All of these characters are a mess and messy besides, and they can hurt each other and give each other the most kindand considerate treatment because they're all so human, so full of heart, and so fucked up. 

The book leaves you on a cliff and is a bit of a gut punch and it made me want to know more and where these characters continue on, which is a compliment to the story and the writing style. But it may be the perfect ending. Not knowing everyone's fate allows you to dream up their tragedy or happy end, whichever you are most drawn to. 

What happens when a de-transitioned Ames, whose sense of parenthood is inextriacbly tied to his former partner Reese, knocks up his boss Katrina? A mess, mostly.

This book goes into the beauty of complicated relationships, the pain of heartbreak, and really pours all of its love into its treatment of queer and trans-ness. All of these characters are a mess and messy besides, and they can hurt each other and give each other the most kindand considerate treatment because they're all so human, so full of heart, and so fucked up. 

The book leaves you on a cliff and is a bit of a gut punch and it made me want to know more and where these characters continue on, which is a compliment to the story and the writing style. But it may be the perfect ending. Not knowing everyone's fate allows you to dream up their tragedy or happy end, whichever you are most drawn to. 

juno

(3.5) i unfortunately struggled to fully connect with the writing and structure of this book, especially with the way flashbacks and timeline jumps were integrated into the narrative. also i wish we had gotten more of katrina’s perspective and history. appreciated its unapologetic queerness and specifically the focus on the experience and lives of trans women and its examination of family, family structures and motherhood/parenting.

Catie Fell

** spoiler alert **
           Beautifully honest story. My immediate reaction was to disagree with a lot of the negative reviews on this one. I think there is something to be said about brutally honest accounts of life that push beyond societal rules and labels. Reese’s realization of her own shortcomings/judgmental tendencies helped me look inward at my own as a queer woman.

Sara

this was definitely not what I thought I was getting myself into but it was ... good? Like, good but also this was a lot and I don't think I was prepared for that much graphic sexual violence. So, yeah. 3 stars.

Incredibly written, engrossing story and characters, will not stop thinking about this for a long time coming 

Rowan Hitchcock

laura

Angel Martinez

My first time reading any material that is this entrenched in the trans experience! Admittedly, it starts off quite slow, complementing layers of context with the most colorful prose I’ve encountered in recent memory. I was actually getting scared that it was going to pull a  If I Had Your Face  and start lecturing me on the complexities of sexuality until it felt forced, therefore diluting the impact of its message.

But Torrey Peters draws you in by laying everything on the table and painting her main triad of characters in the worst possible light, allowing their controversial choices to pose the most provocative questions surrounding gender, parenthood, and purpose. From the get-go, I could tell the myriad of ways that Reese, Ames, and Katrina's plan to assemble a family outside of our society's heteronormative standards could go wrong. In spite of this, I rooted for them fiercely all throughout, learned so much more than I intended and expected, and now feel this strange heartbreak for something I will never fully be able to comprehend myself. I'm confident you will, too.

 Also, if you point out a redundancy/grammatical error in this review, I will slap you it's literally 6am and I haven't slept and it's all because of this book!!!!!

Angbeen Abbas

i am simply never going to stop thinking about this book.

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