Disappoint Me

Max is a trans woman in her thirties, a poet whose work hasn't landed the way she hoped, chronically disappointed in love and increasingly suspicious that heteronormativity was the answer all along. When she meets Vincent — a high-flying Chinese British lawyer whose parents never pictured their son with a trans woman — she finds something that looks like it might actually work. Then his secret from a decade-old gap year surfaces and she has to decide what forgiveness means. Dinan, who grew up in Hong Kong and Malaysia, writes trans experience with the conviction that trans people deserve to be as messy and contradictory as anyone else — she's repulsed by the idea of having to make trans characters virtuous. The comedy is devastating, the one-liners detonate on contact, and the structural critique of heteronormativity and what it costs trans women to try to inhabit it is genuinely sharp. Torrey Peters blurbed it, which is the highest possible endorsement. Winner of the New Adult Book Prize. The companion to Detransition, Baby — where Peters writes from inside trans community dysfunction with maximum chaos, Dinan writes from inside the attempt to access straight domesticity with maximum wit.