“A boat toward nowhere”: Torrey Peters’s ‘Detransition, Baby’

“Give her a week to herself and she began to isolate, cultivating an ash pile of loneliness that built on itself exponentially, until she was daydreaming about selling everything and drifting away on a boat toward nowhere.”

Detransition, Baby is one of those exquisitely crafted, sumptuous, slowburn character studies that makes you both ache for and rage at literally all of the protagonists at one point or another.

When we talk about the power of stories to build soaring pillars of empathy from even the scantest sands, we mean ones like this.

The ending is a masterstroke.

Shout-out to this quote in particular:

“The speculation took on a tone both lurid and compulsory—to have a boss is so commonplace that one rarely remarks on its strangeness, yet its structure compels a cult of personality around even the most quotidian of managers. As an underling, one needs to furnish an epistemology of how it came to pass that she has sway over one’s precious autonomy. Basic comprehension of capitalism’s arbitrary mechanics doesn’t satisfy—the heart demands a human explanation.”

Proletarier aller Länder vereinigt Euch…