Detransition Baby

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.

Hardcover. January 12, 2021

“This conversation-shifting, taboo-busting novel . . . should be on your reading list. It’s an exuberant novel of ideas, desire and life’s messy ironies.”—Evening Standard
 
“Irresistible . . . Witty, elegant and rigorously plotted. . . Although it renders the specificity of trans community and subjectivity in vivid, electric prose, its real appeal is much wider. Detransition, Baby insists on the psychic and social commonalities of cis and trans experience.”—The Guardian

“For Peters, there’s no safe space from which to judge the foibles of your fellow flawed and screwed-up strivers. . . . [Her characters] can’t be slotted into a typical happy ever after nor into its opposite. They make their lives from the bits of gender and love and culture they’ve been given, and there’s no place to stand outside that messy process.”—Los Angeles Times

“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. Torrey Peters evokes these characters with such fullness and compassion that they felt like dear friends to me. This is an important book, and I couldn’t put it down.”—Helen Phillips, author of The Need

“Detransition, Baby updates and transcends (trans-scends!) the Sex and the City model, while fully delivering its many satisfactions! What an exciting time we are living in, to see our beloved literary forms expanded by so many new perspectives! . . . A noteworthy advance in the history of the novel!”—Elif Batuman, bestselling author of The Idiot