Season 2: Torrey Peters in Conversation with Shantel Edwards

Birmingham Lit Fest Presents….

In this week’s episode Festival Director Shantel Edwards talks to debut novelist Torrey Peters about her Women’s Prize longlisted novel Detransition, Baby. Described as ‘a uniquely trans take on love, motherhood and those exes who you just can’t quit’, Detransition, Baby follows three characters as they navigate creating a new version of family for themselves. Join us as we talk about the politics of motherhood, misconceptions about transitioning and writing complex female characters.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.

For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/

Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest

Credits

Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands

TRANSCRIPT

BLF Series 2, Episode 5: Torrey Peters

Intro

Welcome to the second series of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast. We are really excited to be back for a second season and to continue to connect readers and writers in the Midlands, and far beyond.

You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.

In this week’s episode Festival Director Shantel Edwards talks to debut novelist Torrey Peters about her Women’s Prize longlisted novel Detransition, Baby. Described as ‘a uniquely trans take on love, motherhood and those exes who you just can’t quit’, Detransition, Baby follows three characters as they navigate creating a new version of family for themselves. Join us as we talk about the politics of motherhood, misconceptions about transitioning and writing complex female characters.

Shantel Edwards

Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast. I'm Shantel Edwards, the Festival Director and I'm really excited to be in conversation today with Torrey Peters, talking about her debut novel Detransition, Baby. Described as ‘a uniquely trans take on love motherhood, and those exes who just can't quit’, Detransition, Baby is a top 10 bestseller and was long listed for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2021. Torrey lives in Brooklyn, and holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Master's in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth. She is the author of two novellas, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker. Torrey, welcome to the podcast, thank you for being here.

Torrey Peters

I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me.

Shantel Edwards

I just wanted to start by asking how this last year has been for you really, I mean, there's been a pandemic, you've released a book in a pandemic, how has it been this past year?

Torrey Peters

I mean, I think that a lot of people who released books had a pretty difficult time. And I sort of feel bad being an outlier to that, where I, in some ways enjoyed releasing a book in the pandemic, in that most of my writing career has been hyper local, like, it's been part of like a scene of trans writers in Brooklyn. And so, where we read was like, at the local bar, and I saw the same people and there was a way in which I expected this book release to be, you know, have like a two mile radius of interest, maybe around it. And instead, partly because of the pandemic, you know, I would do an event and people from the UK, from Europe, sometimes from South America, Australia, there are people coming to these events from all over the world. As a result, I think, this experience, this book launch ended up being international for me in a way that it couldn't have possibly been, if it wasn't for the pandemic. And I expect that my next book will sort of return to kind of local, you know, a local way of doing it. The book is very Brooklyn. And so in some ways, I find myself lucky. I mean, it seems horrible to say I'm lucky there's a pandemic, a global pandemic, but the timing in terms of finding readers who I otherwise wouldn't have ever come into contact with, I think it was just sort of a fluke of all these things. And there's obviously a lot of dark sides to the pandemic, but for me, it ended up having these unexpected bright sides.

Shantel Edwards

And I guess you've gotten to see the different, was there a different reaction in different parts of the world to the novel?

Torrey Peters

Yeah, I mean, you know, the United States, like, sort of even the conversations about gender in different countries and around trans issues, they're really different. And they're different in different places, like, you know, in New York, for like, kind of trans women in New York, where things are oftentimes more radical and things like that, my book was almost like assimilationist in that it was like, you know, involved with children and family and motherhood which are considered conservative in some places, you know, some scenes. Whereas, you know, if I was talking to like a book group in Indiana, it was radical, it was this wild idea that a trans woman could be part of a nuclear family, or that the nuclear family might not be working. That was like a radical idea. And then, you know, in the UK, it was much more - it wasn't particularly politically polarizing in the US, that wasn't sort of the valence along which readers approached it. But in the UK, I think it had, just in the way that the conversation is there, it was a book that was interpreted politically. And, you know, the pushback was a lot stronger, there was more kind of stereotypically bigoted responses to it. But also, there was a more, I would say, vehement degree of support, you know, the book really was important to people, because there was, I think they felt that there was something very deeply at stake politically, in letting trans women tell their stories in unvarnished ways, and that really mattered. So, the book was, the book got on bestseller lists in both countries, but it got higher in the UK than it did in the US, simply because I think people felt like they had a lot riding on it.

Shantel Edwards

I was reading about your earlier work and I think a lot of your earlier work was very much about writing within the trans community and I wondered what that shift had been like to go from, you know, writing for a particular audience who you know, is going to understand and receive the work in the way it's intended, and then shift into being, I guess, published by a really big publisher, and what that shift was like, and if you felt like there was a, I guess, almost like a lack of control about how the novel might be received.

Torrey Peters

I was lucky while I was writing it, because I didn't know that is was going to be published by a big publisher. And so, I...