Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

Fiction, 2021

How is it, Reese wonders, that a bunch of New York men wearing flannel and slamming whiskey in a cabin is seen as a sorely needed release of their barely tamed an authentic manliness, but when she, a trans, delights in dolling up, she’s trying too hard? It’s no that Reese thinks her desire to dress up reflects some authentic self. It’s just that, unlike bros, she’s willing to call dress-up time what it is. Meanwhile, this starched woman has practically soaked her panties over the homoerotic escapades of her man upstate. Can you imagine if Reese confided in these women, with the same apparent horniness, about her Truvada birth control regimen? Social disaster! She decided for the ten thousandth time that heterosexual cis people, while willfully ignoring it, have staked their whole sexuality on a bet that each other’s genders are real. If only cis heterosexuals would realize that, like trans women, the activity they are indulging in is a big self-pleasuring lie that has little to do with their actual personhood, they’d be free to indulge in a whole new flexible suite of hot ways to lie to each other.

The debut novel from Torrey Peters is filled with terrifically lively prose. The main character is Reese, a trans woman who receives a startling proposition from an ex-partner who detransitioned after their relationship ended. Now known as Ames, he has been in an illicit relationship with his boss Katrina and recently impregnated her. Because Katrina has serious misgivings about having the child, Ames pitches the idea of Reese joining the household as effectively an additional parent. Ames remembers that Reese longed to be a mother when they were together, and he figures this to be a tidy solution to a complicated dilemma.

It’s a credit to Peters that she acknowledges the mighty messiness of this scenario and navigates carefully to a place where it’s plausible that the characters would entertain the possibility of such an unorthodox living situation. All the characters are fully realized, which allows for Peters to shape the necessary emotional truthfulness to make the novel work. The narrative moves back and forth in time with purpose, always filling in important details that build authenticity and understanding. Detransition, Baby is knowing, slyly powerful, and highly entertaining.

The Name of This Band Is R.E.M. by Peter Ames Carlin

Nonfiction, 2024

Look, I’m an easy mark for this book. I can admit that. I was happily toiling away at the college radio station in the first semester of my first year at college when R.E.M. released Green, their sixth studio album overall and opening play on a new major label contract. The four fellows from Athens, Georgia were arguably at the peak of their dominance, still commanding the college charts and simultaneously making noticeable headway with mainstream audiences. Their preceding albums for I.R.S. Records were the cornerstones of college radio, and I studied them with more rigor than I brought to the academics that were ostensibly my main purpose for being on campus. I paged though this reasonably formidable tome anticipating each new addition to the band’s discography and every bend of their career like memorized lyrics from a favorite song.

If Peter Ames Carlin doesn’t exactly surprise me with anything he unearths here — and the book does seem a little lacking in new, original interviews to help find the deeper story — the author is still fine company across The Name of This Band Is R.E.M. He has a sharp sense of when to stick with the basic facts of a band on the rise and when to deep a little deeper, often speculating on how their shifting experience affected the art or offering his own gentle critical assessments. He moves freely through time, filling in the backgrounds of Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Michael Stipe when it feels right rather than sticking to a straight chronology. That can lead to a bit of redundancy cropping up, but the technique mostly works, freeing the book from the leaden sort of progress that can dull biographies. Carlin’s work passes the truest test for a rock ‘n’ roll history: It made me want to pull out the old records and give them fresh spins.