An exquisitely melancholy, reflective, and ultimately hopeful personal history of love and longing.
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.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780374615529
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.
An author’s trip to Venice takes a distinctly Borgesian turn.
In November 2020, soccer club Venizia F.C. offered Nigerian American author Madu a writing residency as part of its plan “to turn the team into a global entity of fashion, culture, and sports.” Flying to Venice for the fellowship, he felt guilty about leaving his immigrant parents, who were shocked to learn upon moving to the U.S. years earlier that their Nigerian teaching certifications were invalid, forcing his father to work as a stocking clerk at Rite Aid to support the family. Madu’s experiences in Venice are incidental to what is primarily a story about his family, especially his strained relationship with his father, who was disappointed with many of his son’s choices. Unfortunately, the author’s seeming disinterest in Venice renders much of the narrative colorless. He says the trip across the Ponte della Libertà bridge was “magical,” but nothing he describes—the “endless water on both sides,” the nearby seagulls—is particularly remarkable. Little in the text conveys a sense of place or the unique character of his surroundings. Madu is at his best when he focuses on family dynamics and his observations that, in the largely deserted city, “I was one of the few Black people around.” He cites Borges, giving special note to the author’s “The House of Asterion,” in which the minotaur “explains his situation as a creature and as a creature within the labyrinth” of multiple mirrors. This notion leads to the Borgesian turn in the book’s second half, when, in an extended sequence, Madu imagines himself transformed into a minotaur, with “the head of a bull” and his body “larger, thicker, powerful but also cumbersome.” It’s an engaging passage, although stylistically out of keeping with much of what has come before.
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781953368669
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
Of most interest to dyed-in-the-wool lovers or haters.
“Not a Cinderella story.”
Baldwin’s loosely written memoir is about motherhood and pregnancy loss, marriage to a celebrity, being the target of gossip and criticism, the experiences of neurodivergency and bilingualism, and more. “When Alec and I met, I was twenty-seven and he was fifty-three,” she writes. “Now, it’s nearly a decade and a half later….People always ask me: What is life actually like with seven kids (and an Alec)? It’s amazing and chaotic.” This book comes on the heels of the first season of the family’s reality show, The Baldwins, seemingly designed to answer the same burning question. While the author seems like a nice, well-meaning person, one comes away from this memoir hoping the television version, with the story sculpted by professionals, is the more entertaining response. Given the fact that there has been controversy about Baldwin’s background, perhaps she should have written a straightforward autobiography. But she has not, and the reader might need to do some research to understand the nature of some of the attacks she writes about. The veracity of her Spanish identity has come under fire, as her birth name is Hilary, she was born in Boston, and is not of Latine descent—but you won’t learn those facts from this book. The author’s relative youth, her choice to have her sixth child via surrogate, and Alec Baldwin’s involvement in the death of a colleague on a film set have all been media fodder. She discusses several specific nemeses without naming them, which is not very interesting. “I grapple with the question: Why am I here in the public space? Why am I ‘relevant’? Am I here because an actor fell in love with me? Am I here because I’m a yoga teacher and have things to say about mental and physical health? Am I here because I had a lot of kids?” It’s not clear that she knows, and neither will you.
Of most interest to dyed-in-the-wool lovers or haters.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781668009987
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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