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Torrey Peters joined us from Brooklyn via Instagram Live yesterday evening to discuss her groundbreaking debut novel, DETRANSITION, BABY, with Shon Faye. If you missed the event live, you can now catch up below.
Huge thanks to Torrey and Shon for an excellent discussion, and thanks also to everyone who joined us live in the chat!
Join us when we welcome Torrey Peters for a virtual event to discuss her new novel, DETRANSITION, BABY, with Shon Faye. The discussion will be held via Instagram Live.
Reese nearly had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York, a job she didn’t hate. She’d scraped together a life previous generations of trans women could only dream of; the only thing missing was a child. Then everything fell apart and three years on Reese is still in self-destruct mode, avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.
When her ex calls to ask if she wants to be a mother, Reese finds herself intrigued. After being attacked in the street, Amy de-transitioned to become Ames, changed jobs and, thinking he was infertile, started an affair with his boss Katrina. Now Katrina’s pregnant.
Could the three of them form an unconventional family – and raise the baby together?
Torrey Peters lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Masters in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth. She is the author of two novellas, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker.
Shon Faye is a writer and editor who has written for The Guardian, The Independent, Vogue, Dazed and others. Her first book The Transgender Issue: an argument for justice will be published in September 2021.
A skilful debut with a lot of heart, Rainbow Milk is a novel adapted from autobiography. It spans the narrator Jesse’s trajectory from a stifling childhood in a Jehovah’s Witness community, coming out as gay and his subsequent estrangement from his family, through to his experiences as a sex worker and waiter as he carves out his path in London searching through sex and drugs, eventually finding his people and the belonging that was lacking in his family. The story begins 50 years earlier with his grandparent’s arrival on the Windrush, clearly showing the traumatic repercussions across generations where hopes for a better life are met with a hostile reception; this doesn’t change for Jesse decades later as a gay black man in white spaces. Mendez brilliantly writes Jamaican patois and Black Country dialect into the dialogue and peppers the narrative with pop culture and music references which make the reading experience truly immersive. This is a stunning rollercoaster of a story about self-discovery through faith, race, sexuality and ultimately love. Highly recommended 🌈 🥛 🖤
