Detransition, Baby

Author(s): Torrey Peters

Fiction.

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.


Product Information

Longlist - Women's Prize for Fiction 2021

Peters confronts the unruliness of our desires, and our vitality as we struggle within their limits ... a dishy, engrossing new novel --New Yorker Irresistible ... Perhaps Detransition, Baby is the first great trans realist novel? Witty, elegant and rigorously plotted, Peters's book breezily plays with the structural conventions of literary realism ... Peters's novel approaches the well trodden topic of baby fever, and although it renders the specificity of trans community and subjectivity in vivid, electric prose, its real appeal is much wider. -- Grace Lavery, Guardian Riveting, insightful, and very funny … an unforgettable portrait of three women, trans and cis, who wrestle with questions of motherhood and family-making. Destined to be a 21st century classic, Detransition, Baby will definitely keep you up late and might destroy your book club, but in a good way. — Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl Torrey Peters just took everything that couldn’t be done, and did it … Plenty of books are good; this book is alive. — Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox Writing with alarming insight, Torrey Peters captures the grandiose, heartfelt and sometimes mangled aspirations of queer and trans people facing an unprecedented array of personal choice. By showing how gender transition (like divorce, or any transformative life event) can be simultaneously destabilizing and liberating, Peters makes trans culture relatable to all. A voraciously knowing, compulsively readable novel. — Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick  

Torrey Peters lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Masters in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth. She is the author of two novellas, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker. @torreypeters

General Fields

  • : 9781788167208
  • : Profile Books
  • : Serpent's Tail
  • : November 2020
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Torrey Peters
  • : hardback with dustjacket
  • : English
  • : 813.6
  • : 340