TUESDAY 25 FEBRUARY 2025
7PM to 8PM
Open to all. Hosted online using Zoom Meetings.
TICKETS: Free, booking required.
ACCESSIBILITY: Live subtitles are available using Zoom's Live Transcript function.
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
The first novel by an openly trans author to be nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Detransition, Baby takes the contemporary realist novel and runs with it into the hot mess of queer millennial adulthood in New York, following a self-destructive trans woman, her ex, who has detransitioned to live as a man, and his cis boss, who is pregnant with his child, as they try to form a family.
Discuss this dishy, confident, and vulnerable novel with the non-binary academic, writer, and gender-diversity consultant, Dr Lloyd Meadhbh Houston.
To aide the conversation, we have prepared three 'thinking points' to consider when reading Detransition, Baby:
1. Early in the novel, Reese talks about women of her age being confronted with the ‘Sex and the City problem’ – a problem facing ‘all women’, but that ‘no generation of trans women had ever solved’. How does Peters handle issues of similarity and difference within the experiences of women?
2. Were there elements of the novel that shocked or surprised you? Were there elements that felt conventional? How do you feel ‘shock-tactics’ and conventions are deployed in the novel and to what ends?
3. Ames tells Reese that ‘he could envision himself becoming a parent, but not a father’. How does the novel approach parenting, family, and community?
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters is available in paperback, hardback, audio and ebook formats, borrowable from public libraries or to purchase. To see what printed and digital copies are available from Cambridge University Libraries (borrowable by University staff and students), search iDiscover.
About The Really Popular Book Club
The Really Popular Book Club is Cambridge University Libraries' book group. Everyone is welcome to come and discuss a really popular book with the group, library staff, and an expert on the novel. Hosted on Zoom, the book club is completely free and open to everyone, people attend from all over the world. The Really Popular Book Club celebrates the huge range of books at Cambridge University Library. We have more than 8 million books and as a legal deposit library we keep a copy of every book published in the UK, and have done since 1710.
If you haven't attended one of our book club events before, you can find more information at www.lib.cam.ac.uk/bookclub.
Photo: © Andrea Lasorte