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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English

DETRANSITION, BABY

Torrey Peters

A very smart and eye-opening debut about three women--transgender and cisgender--whose lives collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires around gender, motherhood, and sex.
In DETRANSITION, BABY, we are introduced to Reese, a trans woman who almost had everything she wanted: a loving relationship with Amy, a job she didn't mind, and potentially a family, the thing she always wanted. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of, that being a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing for her was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a very unhealthy pattern, avoiding her loneliness in self-destructive and even dangerous ways.

Ames isn't completely happy either, though he has taken a job as a man and has been dating his boss, a cis woman. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but it has cost him his relationship with Reese--and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is definitely over, he longs to find a way back to her to ground him the only way family can. When Ames's 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. This novel explores our deepest, darkest desires as women, especially the ones we may be too ashamed of to admit out loud. Peters's knows this world, she is a trans woman writer writing about characters who are flawed and angry. They come from extremely different places, but with a common goal: to examine and rethink womanhood.

Torrey Peters lives in Brooklyn. She is the author of two novellas, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker. She also holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a master's in comparative literature from Dartmouth. Check out her profile in them.: https://bit.ly/2pC0XBq, written by Harron Walker, March 2018
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Published 2021-01-12 by One World

Book

Published 2021-01-12 by One World

Comments

UK/BC: Serpent's Tail/Profile Books ; Portuguese/Brazil: Tordesilhas ; Italian: Mondadori

An emotionally devastating, culturally specific, endlessly intelligent novel [that is] really, really funny.

A landmark piece of trans literature - brutally honest and yet incredibly sensitive about trans living, tremendously funny and sexy as hell.

DETRANSITION, BABY is a finalist for the 2022 Gotham Book Prize!

DETRANSITION, BABY is Longlisted for The Women's Prize, alongside Susanna Clarke, Brit Bennett, and Raven Leilani! Read more...

A world so lovable and complex, it's hard to let go.

Read about Torrey in this New York profile Read more...

Brit Bennett named DETRANSITION, BABY as her "Wishlist Read" on the TODAY SHOW! Read more...

Detransition, Baby's warmth and wit feel both familiar and utterly new: a tale of love, loss, and self-discovery as singular as it is universal, and all the sweeter for it.

'Whip-smart' is just one of the many flattering adjectives and fawning superlatives people are going to overuse for this wise book by a glamorous, fascinating woman, and who can blame them? Its incisive exploration of chasers, divorce, trauma, queer parenting, and detransition itself is going to play a role in defining the literature of 2021 and beyond.

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.

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.

DETRANSITION, BABY is named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by: O Mag Vulture ; Marie Claire ; Cosmo ; Refinery 29 ; Bustle ; The Millions ; Electric Lit ; Autostraddle ; Time Magazine ; CNN ; Daily Kos ; Hello Giggles ; She Reads ; Hey Alma ; Lit Hub

Detransition, Baby is emotionally generous, richly textured, and deeply intelligent - a vibrant and kaleidoscopic portrait of complicated women and their colliding lives.

In this riveting, insightful, and very funny debut, Torrey Peters paints 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.

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!

Smart, funny, and bighearted... A wonderfully original exploration of desire and the evolving shape of family [and]... a dishy contemporary drama. 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.

I love Detransition, Baby for its wit, its irreverence. And I love it even more for its reverenceits 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.

DETRANSITION, BABY HAS WON THE PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARD! For Debut Novel!

Fantastic news for DETRANSITION, BABY which is being adapted as television series by Joan Rater, Tony Phelan & Anonymous Content and Torrey Peters is executive producing the project and will write the pilot episode. Read more...

Irresistible... Witty, elegant and rigorously plotted... although it renders the specificity of trans community and subjectivity in vivid, electric prose... Detransition, Baby insists on the psychic and social commonalities of cis and trans experience.

DETRANSITION, BABY is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle 2021 John Leonard Prize for Best First Book!

Detransition, Baby is, simply put, fantastic. But somehow even the most complimentary adjectives feel insufficient to describe Torrey Peters' first novel... Devastating, hilarious, touching, timely, this is an acutely intelligent story about womanhood, parenthood and all the possibilities that lie within.

[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.

This book. This book. Torrey Peters just took everything that couldn't be done, and did it. Out of the vibrant particulars of trans experience, Detransition, Baby renews a fundamental novelistic ambition: to peel back the skin of social life and illuminate the captivating details of desire and family underneath. Plenty of books are good; this book is alive.