It follows three New Yorkers in their late 30s as they face various life crises and contemplate an unconventional solution to their problems: raising a child together. The novel, Detransition, Baby, is among the first written by a trans woman to be issued by a big-five publishing house. “It was a thought experiment for how to live as a trans woman,” she said. The book was an attempt to imagine how that life might be achieved. By the time she sat down to write her first novel, in the summer of 2016, she was entertaining a previously unthinkable fantasy: a family, maybe kids. It was also the most insecure I’ve been in my life.” The relationship didn’t last (Peters’s marriage collapsed too), and after a year, the trophy-wife fantasy fizzled out. She bought a wardrobe of sundresses and heels a trip to the grocery store entailed two hours of makeup. The tech guy was married, but Peters decided to move to Seattle to become his mistress. It all seems ridiculous to me now, but at the time I was dead serious.” “I wanted to take care of a man and have a dog we walked together. “I wanted to be a trophy wife,” she recalled. By the end of that visit, she had settled on a new vision of her future.

She met a wealthy tech guy on Facebook a while back who wanted to fly her out to Seattle for a long weekend. from the University of Iowa’s writing workshop, but she didn’t want to be a writer anymore, either. She was 32 years old, in an open marriage, and in the midst of a fellowship program in comparative literature at Dartmouth when she realized she no longer wanted to be a professor. Around the time the novelist Torrey Peters transitioned, she was spending more and more time talking to strangers on the internet.

The Masker by Torrey Peters