Love is supposedly attainable for us all. But for most people, especially women, success with 'love'—the yardstick we use to measure our value across romance, parenthood, sex, religion, and friendship—can feel out of reach, an experience frequently ascribed to a personal failing. This sense of unworthiness is, according to Shon Faye, 'a form of exile: an intentional, punitive banishment that serves political ends.' Faye, a trans woman in her thirties, has felt isolated from love for as long as she can remember. So after the devastation of her first heartbreak, she figured it was time to find out why.
What makes Shon Faye’s memoir about love so refreshing is that it resists heteropessimism, and tries to do something more hopeful ... Blaming your failure to find love on capitalism, as Faye does here, feels a bit of a reach to me ... Love in Exile is more enlightening when Faye suggests specific changes we can effect–on an individual level–to make our relationships more enriching ... The best writing in this book acknowledges that we fall in love in a capitalist patriarchy, but doesn’t pretend that women are only ever passive victims of those systems ... Love in Exile is sincere in a way that reminds me of bell hooks’ 1999 book All About Love ... Like hooks, Faye is prepared to mine every experience, and share every hard-won lesson to try to get her reader to love in better ways–even if those lessons are, in their very earnestness, exposing. I find her vulnerability generous ... The end of this book is, crucially, optimistic ... By the time I put down this book I felt hopeful about men, and heterosexuality in general–which, considering I read it in the aftermath of a breakup, is no small thing.
Beautiful ... The shifts in the book’s tone, between the personal and the political, can be alienating ... Her cluster of negative associations around the maternal drive...can’t help but give the impression that she suspects women, cis and trans, who long for children may have drunk the Kool-Aid of oppression ... In overlooking love itself as the main driver to have children, Faye undermines one of the great powers of mothers both cis and trans–or any parent for that matter–which I’m sure she does not intend to do ... the book’s tonal shifts dramatise the tension between political radicalism and the often messy, contradictory nature of the life behind it. The latter is the book’s great strength for me and, I think, the real source of its political power. Words like 'capital' and 'peasant class' do not capture the heart as Faye’s poetic writing does ... The portrait of the 'pantomime' she enacts under the male gaze strikes a piano’s worth of chords ... The vivid vignettes of her dating life moved me.
An exquisitely melancholy, reflective, and ultimately hopeful personal history of love and longing ... Faye eloquently elaborates on how the idyllic and frustratingly elusive search for companionship has since evolved, forcing her to revisit and confront the old, damaging, self-destructive ideas about lovelessness and unworthiness she’d experienced as a dissonant, gender dysphoric young adult. The author’s referential and historical discussion about the ideal of romantic love is as fascinating as chapters on Faye’s trials on gay dating apps ... A closing chapter on religion is awkwardly extraneous, but Faye’s prose is so conversational, readers won’t even notice. With language as crisp and passionate as that found in her report on systemic transphobia and social justice, The Transgender Issue (2021), Faye’s book deliberates over the pleasures and pitfalls of relationships, navigating them in a way that will appeal to all readers, regardless of their sexuality.
