Love in exile

In this poignant and thought-provoking memoir, journalist and essayist Faye (The Transgender Issue) pairs a cultural analysis of love with a chronicle of her own experiences with the emotion. What begins as a reflection on the complexities of Faye's queer and trans identities and her search for self-acceptance evolves into a broader critique of love's evolving definitions and its roles in contemporary society. Faye nimbly knits together musings on romance, family life, and self-love, reflecting on the breakdown of multiple relationships--particularly a significant one that ended because Faye's partner, a cis man, wanted biological children--and delving into the impact of her father's alcoholism on her own struggles with substance abuse. Elsewhere, she writes ambivalently of Grindr and casual hookups ("I have, at certain points, considered my sexual desire for men a personal liability"). These intimate stories are enriched by references to writers and thinkers including bell hooks, Simone de Beauvoir, and Germaine Greer, whose ideas help Faye make sense of love's shifting meanings across decades and contexts. The resulting narrative is rigorous and illuminating without tipping into excessive self-seriousness. This lyrical reflection on love is a sure bet for readers who like their memoirs raw and their cultural criticism sharp. (May)

A brokenhearted transgender woman reflects on the evanescence of romantic love. A decade ago, author Faye was traversing South London after-parties, openly apathetic about the notions of dating, falling in love, and relationships. Now, as a single woman in her mid-30s, her attitudes have changed. She'd found herself besotted, immersed in a love affair with a cis man for a year and a half, which then collapsed due to their own diverging styles of loving and her inability to bear biological offspring. Faye's journey grieving the devastating breakup forms what she considers to be one of the "most ubiquitous of struggles" in her life as a trans woman. While she confesses that the excruciatingly painful "lovesickness devoured me from the inside out," it also afforded her moments of formative reflection. Faye eloquently elaborates on how the idyllic and frustratingly elusive search for companionship has since evolved, forcing her to revisit and confront the old, damaging, self-destructive ideas about lovelessness and unworthiness she'd experienced as a dissonant, gender dysphoric young adult. The author's referential and historical discussion about the ideal of romantic love is as fascinating as chapters on Faye's trials on gay dating apps, the "tiny teenage humiliations" of adult male-to-female transition, attempts at separating emotional vulnerability and sex, and the culture of shame and invisibility around trans women as desirable, sexual people. Faye's narrative diverts further still to debate the tenets of desire, motherhood, gender-critical feminism, and queer friendship, as well as addiction, her father's alcoholism, and her own journey toward sobriety. A closing chapter on religion is awkwardly extraneous, but Faye's prose is so conversational, readers won't even notice. With language as crisp and passionate as that found in her report on systemic transphobia and social justice,The Transgender Issue (2021), Faye's book deliberates over the pleasures and pitfalls of relationships, navigating them in a way that will appeal to all readers, regardless of their sexuality. An exquisitely melancholy, reflective, and ultimately hopeful personal history of love and longing. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.