Love in Exile
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- $229.00
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- $229.00
Descripción editorial
The acclaimed Top 10 Sunday Times best-seller on our search for love
'Uncommonly wise and honest. Love in Exile flooded me with a sense of continuity and hope. A masterpiece, from start to finish' - Maggie Nelson
Shon Faye grew up quietly obsessed with the feeling that love was not for her. Not just romantic love: the secret fear of her own unworthiness penetrated every aspect and corner of her life. It was a fear that would erupt in destructive, counterfeit versions of the real love she craved: addictions and short-lived romances that were either euphoric and fantastical, or excruciatingly painful and unhinged, often both. Faye’s experience of the world as a trans woman, who grew up visibly queer, exacerbated her fears. But, as she confronted her damaging ideas about love and lovelessness, she came to realize that this sense of exclusion is symptomatic of a much larger problem in our culture.
Love, she argues, is as much a collective question as a personal one. Yet our collective ideals of love have developed in a society which is itself profoundly sick and loveless; in which consumer capitalism sells us ever new, engrossing fantasies of becoming more loved or lovable. In this highly politicized terrain, boundaries are purposefully drawn to keep some in and to keep others out. Those who exist outside them are ignored, denigrated, exiled.
In Love in Exile, Shon Faye shows love is much greater than the narrow ideals we have been taught to crave so desperately that we are willing to bend and break ourselves to fit them. Wise, funny, unsparing, and suffused with a radical clarity, this is a book of and for our times: for seeing and knowing love, in whatever form it takes, is the meaning of life itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this poignant and thought-provoking memoir, journalist and essayist Faye (The Transgender Issue) pairs a cultural analysis of love with a chronicle of her own experiences with the emotion. What begins as a reflection on the complexities of Faye's queer and trans identities and her search for self-acceptance evolves into a broader critique of love's evolving definitions and its roles in contemporary society. Faye nimbly knits together musings on romance, family life, and self-love, reflecting on the breakdown of multiple relationships—particularly a significant one that ended because Faye's partner, a cis man, wanted biological children—and delving into the impact of her father's alcoholism on her own struggles with substance abuse. Elsewhere, she writes ambivalently of Grindr and casual hookups ("I have, at certain points, considered my sexual desire for men a personal liability"). These intimate stories are enriched by references to writers and thinkers including bell hooks, Simone de Beauvoir, and Germaine Greer, whose ideas help Faye make sense of love's shifting meanings across decades and contexts. The resulting narrative is rigorous and illuminating without tipping into excessive self-seriousness. This lyrical reflection on love is a sure bet for readers who like their memoirs raw and their cultural criticism sharp.
