JANUARY 2021 - AudioFile
Renata Friedman narrates this messy, smart, and bighearted debut with a beautifully light touch. The story follows three women caught up in the complicated task of redefining family for themselves: Reese, a trans woman who let go of her dream of motherhood when her relationship imploded; Ames, Reese's ex, who is now living as a man, and Katrina, Ames's girlfriend. These characters are wonderfully, imperfectly human, and Friedman captures every nuance of their shifting emotions as they navigate desire, heartbreak, love, and parenthood. Her thoughtful narration, filled with humor and longing in equal measure, elevates this remarkable novel into something extraordinary. This audiobook illuminates the beating heart of modern queer and trans life; it’s one you’re not going to want to miss. L.S. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
11/23/2020
Peters’s sharp comedy (after Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones) charts the shifting dynamics of gender, relationships, and family as played out in three characters’ exploration of trans femininity. Reese, a trans woman from the Midwest now living in New York City, is in the throes of an affair with a kinky, dominant, and married man. Ames, Reese’s ex who has detransitioned since their breakup three years earlier, is now with his boss, a divorced cis woman named Katrina. When Katrina gets pregnant, Ames must reckon with his gender once again. Katrina intends to get an abortion if Ames leaves her, and he comes up with a solution so crazy it just might work. He cannot be a father, but he can be a parent (“He knew, however, that Katrina didn’t have the queer background to allow for that distinction”), and Reese, more than anything, wants to be a mother; desperate, Ames asks Reese if she will be a co-mother; he also confesses to Katrina that he once lived as a woman. As Reese, Katrina, and Ames reckon with the possibility and difficulties of forming a family, their quick wit gets them through heavy scenes (Reese on Katrina’s “AIDS panic”: “How retro”). Peters conceives of a world so lovable and complex, it’s hard to let go. Agent: Kent Wolf, Neon Literary. (Jan.)
From the Publisher
I loved seeing [Detransition, Baby] on other people’s lists because, you know, Torrey Peters, she went there. It was just irreverent, [referencing] so many things that queer people don’t necessarily want to talk about. And she made a story out of it instead of sitting and making the discomfort the only story.”—Roxane Gay, The New York Times
“Detransition, Baby is so good I want to scream.”—Carmen Maria Machado
“This book is exhilaratingly good.”—Jia Tolentino
“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
“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.”—Garth Greenwell
“If I had the ability to momentarily wipe my memory, I’d use it to reread Detransition, Baby for the first time.”—Vogue
“Even the most complimentary adjectives feel insufficient to describe Torrey Peters’ first novel.”— Bookpage (starred review)
“This emotionally devastating, culturally specific, endlessly intelligent novel is . . . really, really funny.”—Austostraddle
“A fiercely confident novel.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
“With heart and savvy, [Detransition, Baby upends] our traditional, gendered notions of what parenthood can look like.”—The New York Times Book Review
“[Peters] confronts the unruliness of our desires, and our vitality as we struggle within their limits.”—The New Yorker
“[An] electrifying debut . . . a deeply searching novel that resists easy answers.”—Esquire
“Peters’s soap opera-meets-modern-cultural-analysis is witty, emotional, and eye-opening.”—People
“[Peters gets] to the very heart of what it means to exist as a gendered being in the world.”—them
“Funny and gossipy and insightful and cutting and absolutely delicious, all while tackling issues from a lens that has been missing from the literary world for way too long.”—Refinery29
“‘[Detransition, Baby] is going to play a role in defining the literature of 2021 and beyond.”—The Millions
“Plenty of books are good; this book is alive.”—Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
Library Journal
09/01/2020
A good-enough job, a New York apartment, and a loving relationship—Reese has more than previous generations of trans women ever expected, though she still wants a child. Then girlfriend Amy decides to detransition to Ames. A trans woman writer's debut novel following two fan-favorite novellas.
JANUARY 2021 - AudioFile
Renata Friedman narrates this messy, smart, and bighearted debut with a beautifully light touch. The story follows three women caught up in the complicated task of redefining family for themselves: Reese, a trans woman who let go of her dream of motherhood when her relationship imploded; Ames, Reese's ex, who is now living as a man, and Katrina, Ames's girlfriend. These characters are wonderfully, imperfectly human, and Friedman captures every nuance of their shifting emotions as they navigate desire, heartbreak, love, and parenthood. Her thoughtful narration, filled with humor and longing in equal measure, elevates this remarkable novel into something extraordinary. This audiobook illuminates the beating heart of modern queer and trans life; it’s one you’re not going to want to miss. L.S. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2020-10-14
A wonderfully original exploration of desire and the evolving shape of family.
Reese’s specialty is horrible married men—and she has carefully analyzed all the reasons why. She is, in fact, exquisitely self-aware when it comes to her self-destructive tendencies. When her ex, Ames, asks her to be a second mother to the baby his lover, Katrina, is carrying, Reese knows exactly why she doesn’t say no: She believes that motherhood will make her a real woman. Ames has issues of his own. Fatherhood is not a role he wants for himself—which is not to say that he doesn’t want to be a parent. It’s his hope that, by bringing Reese into their ménage, he might make Katrina consider other, less binary, possibilities. Set in New York and peopled with youngish professionals (and folks who are, at least, professional-adjacent), this novel has the contours of a dishy contemporary drama, and it is that. What sets it apart from similar novels are the following details: Reese is a trans woman, and, when she and Ames were together, Ames was Amy and also a trans woman. Detransitioning—returning to the gender assigned at birth after living as another gender—is a fraught subject. People who change their minds about transitioning are often held up as cautionary tales or as evidence that trans identity is a phase or a sickness, not something real. Peters, a trans woman, knows this, and, in Ames, she has created a character who does not conform to any hateful stereotype. Ames is, like every other human, complicated, and his relationship to his own body and his own gender is just one of his complexities. Reese is similarly engaging. She’s kind of a mess, but who isn’t? There’s no question that there will be much that’s new here for a lot of readers, but the insider view Peters offers never feels voyeuristic, and the author does a terrific job of communicating cultural specificity while creating universal sympathy. Trans women will be matching their experiences against Reese’s, but so will cis women—and so will anyone with an interest in the human condition.
Smart, funny, and bighearted.