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Torrey Peters talking to Liz Duck-Chong about Detransition, Baby - SWF 2022
Torrey Peters talking to Liz Duck-Chong about Detransition, Baby - SWF 2022

Torrey Peters on Detransition, Baby. SWF 2022

At 8pm on Thursday 19 May I walked into a cavernous hall at Carriageworks to hear Brooklyn-based writer Torrey Peters talk via video from Poland to Liz Duck-Chong in Sydney.

It was an absolutely mesmerising conversation. Even via screen Peters was dazzling! She brought the house down. And Duck-Chong asked such beautifully nuanced, thoughtful and searching questions that at the end Peters praised her exceptional contribution to the evening. The questions from the audience were also excellent, including one that prompted Peters to reflect on ‘sad girl lit’ and Jean Rhys.

Peters was there to talk about her 2021 novel Detransition, Baby, her breakthrough book which became an internationally acclaimed sensation. Its three central characters are bound by the question of a child: trans woman, Reese; her former partner who’s detransitioned from Amy to Ames; and cis woman, Katrina, who suddenly finds herself pregnant with Ames’s child. Peters called Reese a trans version of Fleabag, living in Brooklyn, NYC.

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book review, books, feminism, transgenderJane Gleeson-Whitebooks, Torrey Peters, Detransition, Detransition Baby, fiction, novel, novels, trans, transition, divorced women
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong’s first book, the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), circles obsessively around fathers. (Vuong’s violent father left soon after the family – grandmother, mother, father, son – arrived in Hartford, Connecticut, from Saigon via a refugee camp in the Philippines when Vuong was two years old.)

In its middle is a four-page poem called ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’, which opens like this:

Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give
the body what it knows

it cannot keep. That this amber light
whittled down by another war
is all that pins my hand to your chest.

After war, with violence and trauma in our bodies, what happens to love? How do we connect, body to body?

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books, new book, book reviewJane Gleeson-Whitebook review, books, Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, war', love, trauma, mother, son, poetry, violence, Vietnam, America