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![Detransition, Baby: A Novel by [Torrey Peters]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51MNvOqU4mL._SY346_.jpg)
Detransition, Baby: A Novel Kindle Edition
Torrey Peters (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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“Reading this novel is like holding a live wire in your hand.”—Vulture
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by more than twenty publications, includingThe New York Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Time, Vogue, Esquire, Vulture, and Autostraddle
PEN/Hemingway Award Winner • Finalist forthe Lambda Literary Award,the National Book Critics Circle Award,and the Gotham Book Prize • 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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherOne World
- Publication dateJanuary 12, 2021
- File size4139 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“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.”—TheNew 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
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Katrina sits in the roller chair before Ames’s desk. The moment has an air of uncommon inversion. Because she is his boss, Ames nearly always goes to her office and sits in front of her desk. Her office, corresponding to their relative places in the corporate hierarchy, is double the square footage of his, with two full windows looking out on two neighboring buildings, and between them, a sliver of East River view. By contrast, Ames’s office has one window overlooking a small parking lot. Once, in the twilight, he saw a brown creature trotting spritely across the pavement—and has since maintained that it was an urban coyote. One takes one’s excitements where one may.
Katrina rifles through a briefcase, pulls out a manila folder, and plops it on his desk. Her coming to his office makes him tense, like a teenager whose parents have entered his room.
“Well,” she says. “It’s real. This is happening.” He reaches for the folder. He has good posture, and gives her an easy smile. The folder opens to reveal printouts from an online patient portal.
“My gyno,” Katrina says, watching him closely. “She followed up with a blood test and a pelvic exam. She confirmed the home test results. Without an ultrasound, she can’t say how far I am, so I had one scheduled for the Thursday after next. I mean, I know you maybe aren’t sure yet how you feel about it, but maybe if you come, that’ll help? If I’m more than four weeks into it, we’ll be able to see the baby—or I guess, embryo?”
He is aware that she is scrutinizing him for a reaction. He had been unable to give one after the pregnancy test came back positive. He feels the same numbness that he felt then, only now, he can no longer delay by telling her that he wants to wait for official confirmation to get his emotions involved. “Amazing,” he says, and tries out a smile that he fears might be coming off as a grimace. “I guess it’s real! Especially since we have”—he searches briefly for a phrase, and then comes up with one—“an entire dossier of evidence.”
Katrina shifts to cross her legs. She’s wearing casual wedge heels. He always notices her clothing, half out of admiration, and half out of the habit of noting what’s going on in the field of women’s fashion. “Your reaction has been hard to read,” she says carefully. “I don’t know, I thought maybe if you saw it in black and white, I’d be able to gauge how you were actually feeling.” She pauses and swallows. “But I still can’t.” He sees the effort it costs her to muster this level of assertion.
He stands up, walks around the desk, and half sits against it, just in front of her, so his leg is touching hers.
He rotates the printouts, there’s a list of test results, but he can’t make sense of them. His brain shorts out when he cross-references the data that they clearly show—he is a father-to-be—with the data he stores in his heart: He should not be a father.
Three years have passed since Ames stopped taking estrogen. He injected his last dose on Reese’s thirty-second birthday. Reese, his ex, still lives in New York. They haven’t spoken in two years, although he sent her a birthday card last year. He received no response. Throughout their relationship, she had always talked assuredly about how she’d have a kid by age thirty-five. As far as he knows, that hasn’t happened.
It is only now, three years after their breakup, that Ames is able to talk about Reese casually, calling her “my ex” and moving the conversation along without dwelling. Because in truth, he still misses her in a way that talking about her, thinking about her, remains dangerous to indulge in—as an alcoholic can’t think too much about how much she’d really like just one drink. When Ames thinks hard about Reese, he feels abandoned and grows angry, morose, and worst of all, ashamed. Because he has trouble explaining exactly what he still wants from her. For a while he thought it was romance, but his desire has lost any kind of sexual edge. Instead, he misses her in a familial way, in the way he missed and felt betrayed by his birth family when they cut off contact in the early years of his transition. His sense of abandonment plucked at a nerve deeper, more adolescent than that of jilted adult romantic love. Reese hadn’t just been his lover, she’d been something like his mother. She had taught him to be a woman . . . or he’d learned to be a woman with her. She had found him in a plastic state of early development, a second puberty, and she’d molded him to her tastes. And now she was gone, but the imprint of her hands remained, so that he could never forget her.
He hadn’t understood how little sense he made as a person without Reese until after she began to detach from him, until the lack of her became so painful that he started to once again want the armor of masculinity and, somewhat haphazardly, detransitioned to fully suit up in it.
So now, three years have passed living once again in a testosterone-dependent body. Yet even without the shots or pills, Ames had believed that he’d been on androgen-blockers long enough to have atrophied his testicles into permanent sterility. That’s what he told Katrina when they hooked up the first time, the night of the agency’s annual Easter Keg Hunt. He told her that he was sterile—not that he’d been a transsexual woman with atrophied balls.
Product details
- ASIN : B08191CR94
- Publisher : One World (January 12, 2021)
- Publication date : January 12, 2021
- Language : English
- File size : 4139 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 353 pages
- Lending : Not Enabled
- Best Sellers Rank: #17,100 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #3 in Transgender Fiction
- #35 in LGBTQ+ Literary Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #39 in LGBTQ+ Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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Top reviews from the United States
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I don't think any woman can read this book and say 'hey that character represents me'. The only thought that came to my mind is that only someone who's male could have written women like this and think this is a nuance or realistic portrayal of womanhood. Maybe, some excerpts of this book should be posted to r/menwritingwomen because it is worth a laugh. But it is definitely not worth a whole read because other than being stupidly sexist, it is an extremely boring story.
I really wish I could have given zero stars. What a waste.
Lots of bitter snark and cleverly weaponized banter, if that's what you like.
The main character is a self-centered, shallow mess pretending to be deep bcuz: reasons. The protagonist shows no real insight or evolution - simply remains a narcissist who refuses to be a responsible adult. Bringing chaos into the lives of others while claiming victimhood is not edgy - it's pathetic. For Peters' characters, it's all about fetishized sex - not true gender dysphoria (Ames comes close).
A lot of disparaging het lifestyles while trying to appropriate the same. Good way to alienate potential supporters.
A very politicized view of bathroom politics (who cares? just go!) and what it means to be a woman. No born woman I know refers to herself as "cis" - how labelling is that? and not one of them has a penis. I can already see the offended reactions: don't you dare criticize me or tell the truth because my outrage will incinerate you. It's fine to intimidate or yell others into submission, and avoid logic at all costs. Well, how tiresome. I don't need to read more in a book.
The unbelievable plot plodded just along.... yawn. It was so boring and predictable I couldn't believe I bothered to continue reading it; I kept hoping sometime - anything - interesting would happen. What a waste of time and money.
The end sucked too - as if the author couldn't figure out how to stop.
Returning it - the first book I have ever returned.
Secondly, I am so glad to read the references to certain places and parties, I hope they survive the pandemic, even though many of them didn't even survive the pre-pandemic. (hey queen!).
Third, not exactly, but towards the end, this book really encapsulated how one of my closest friendships ended. In your thirties all of the problems hit. Especially in the class of 20-somethings I started in, the chasms became really wide and varied amongst people I care about. I still do not have the eloquent language to describe how one of my best friend's moments with transitioning and my moments with fertility led to a total dissolution of a relationship I still care deeply about.
So, plot summary, a de-transitioned man impregnates his boss on accident and asks his ex to help raise the baby with them. Sounds complex, but the stories and anecdotes were told with such a sardonic wit that I really enjoyed the comical elements of the narrative. I totally get Reese's ability to use really transcendent logic to find her way to any solution she is looking for. I also totally understand Katrina's dissolution of her marriage and fertility. The character I had the most difficult time with was Ames mostly because he (and at times she) didn't seem to fully want to confront any struggles. Whether it is transitioning, or pregnancy, or even financial solvency, life's struggles do a great job of defining our character, and his/her rejection of embracing the struggles, while is common in people, did not endear the character to me. But we all need someone to dislike in a book, right?
Though this book is probably groundbreaking, it really does a great job of describing a time, place, and history that is actually just the everyday lives of many people.
Top reviews from other countries

But....
I felt sick to my stomach when I encountered the deranged logic espoused by the main character considering male violence against women. I got the nasty impression that the writer feels it is almost a Cis privilege to have their femininity validated by being beaten by men; that it allows them to feel dainty and weak and therefore more feminine.
At a time when women are too frequently being killed by men, often in domestic violence incidents where a controlling partner exercises his most final and total method of control, I was disgusted by one character's wish that a man would love her enough to kill her. I doubt any of the unfortunate real life victims, whose lives were cut short by the men who "loved" them, would agree.


Overall, if you like intelligent, witty fiction which focuses on the lives of women (like Emma Unsworth's Adults) you would enjoy this.

At the end of their relationship, Amy made the decision to Detransition and now, as Ames, is having an affair with his recently divorced boss, Katrina.
When Katrina unexpectedly falls pregnant, Ames isn’t sure he can be a father, as much as he feels he wants to be a parent with Katrina. His solution is to ask his ex, Reese, to co-parent with them. This will support his need to not be seen as the traditional male father figure, will fulfil Reese’s deepest desire to be a mum and Katrina won’t be alone in raising a baby.
The story jumps between present day, through the first trimester of the pregnancy, to Reese and Amy’s courtship and relationship, and with glimpses into their childhoods.
Although I found this to be a little preachy and pretentious at points, I loved it. I completely get why it was Long Listed for @WomensPrize for Fiction.
I loved Reese. I loved her story, I rooted for her, I felt her longing to be a mum and wanted her to find that happiness and fulfilment.
Ames story opened my eyes to why someone would chose to Detransition, how much someone can struggle with their truest identity. It opened my eyes as to why the triad parenting would seem like the optimal solution which, to be honest, I was a bit unsure would make sense when I first started reading this.
Katrina might have bugged me a little 😂
This is a story of motherhood, and I thought the story was told so honestly and openly and beautifully and I definitely think you should read it, if you haven’t already.
