NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The lives of three women—transgender and cisgender—collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2021 SO FAR . . .Vulture: “Reading this novel is like holding a live wire in your hand.”Time: “One of the most celebrated novels of the year.”Marie Claire: “You won’t be able to put it down.”Bustle: “The book everyone … year.”
Marie Claire: “You won’t be able to put it down.”
Bustle: “The book everyone is talking about.”
Longlisted for The Women’s Prize • Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club Pick • New York Times Editors’ Choice
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.
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I had a hard time getting into this book initially. I had to get used to being dropped into the deep end of something so different, sort of like when I start reading Shakespeare or Zora Neale Hurston (and I think it’s also possible the author took a little while to relax into her story). But then it grabbed me hard and didn’t let go. This is a gutsy literary exploration of womanhood from a unique perspective, and I think women especially (cis or otherwise) may enjoy the many insights and ironies along the way, not that I’m assuming this is the final word on anything, especially feminism. I also found this a delightfully funny book, although I’m sure tastes for that will vary. I appreciated the chance to “get” what it means to be transgender way better than I have before. Recommended for non-prudish literary readers with open minds.
This book is so much weightier than my normal reads. It is filled with layers and hurt and pain and joy. It took me out of my comfort zone for a lot of the sexual parts and made no apology. It made me realize how much of my cis white hell life I don’t even have to think about. It really brought home to me how dangerous the world can be for trans women, which I knew in an intellectual level but now I feel it on a visceral level. And can I just say, the juvenile elephants analogy broke my heart.
I would also add that this is no HEA book. The ending was more than a little frustrating to me, but that’s not a bad thing at all. Life isn’t so easily tied up in neat little bows.
I would normally be frustrated that none of the main characters went to therapy and suggest that needed to be addressed but honestly, it’s hard to believe that even therapy would be a safe place for trans women to be seen and understood.
Trigger warnings: there’s a lot.
I’ve seen so much hype about this book that I thought it couldn’t possibly live up to it’s reviews, but I’m delighted to say I was wrong. Destransition, Baby is a fabulous, witty, insightful and devastating debut novel that centres around a complicated relationship between three women and their kind of shared baby. Amy and Reese had been together for years, living a life of domestic bliss and hoping to find a way for them to start a family together as two trans women. However, when their relationship is rocked by a traumatic event, Amy chooses to detransition and go back to living as a cisgender man, Ames, and loses his relationship with Reese in the process. Years later, Reese is numbing her pain by having ill-advised affairs with married men and Ames still feels uncomfortable in his masculine identity and longs to find a way to have Reese back in his life. When Ames accidentally impregnates his girlfriend and boss, Katrina, after believing he was sterile after being on hormones for so many years, he sees a way for he and Reese to build the family they always wanted and create an unconventional family unit that will allow him to be a parent without being a ‘father’. All Ames needs to do is convince Reese and Katrina to get onboard with his plan. I’ve never read a novel like this before. It smashes the taboos that surround sex, gender, relationships and family so thoroughly but it’s also a beautiful book, utterly compelling and utterly unique. It is absolutely my number one recommendation of the month.
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.
I love Detransition, Baby for its wit, its irreverence. And I love it even more for its reverence—its reverence for the quest for womanhood, motherhood, selfhood. This is an important book, and I couldn’t put it down.
This is true. It’s the smartest novel I’ve read in ages. I wish I could figure out how it manages to be utterly savage & lacerating while also conveying endlessly expanding compassion. It’s kind of a miracle.
I loved the way this book plays with time, moving forward and back through the arc of Reese and Ames’ becoming. The most delightfully complex consideration of gender I’ve seen in fiction.