LOVE IN EXILE

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.