Torrey Peters’ debut novel, Detransition, Baby, was an instant sensation. Longlisted for the Women’s Prize in the UK and named one of the New York Times’ best books of the 21st century so far, the book catapulted Torrey into the limelight. Her second and latest book, Stag Dance, is a collection of four stories that are brutal, funny, and brilliant. This week, Michael sits down with Torrey to discuss the genesis of Stag Dance and why she isn’t interested in trans identity. Reading list: Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters, 2021 Stag Dance, Torrey Peters, 2025 The Unquiet Grave, Dervla McTiernan, 2025 You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favourite independent book store. Socials: Stay in touch with Read This on Instagram Guest: Torrey Peters Transcript: Amongst the myriad attacks on civil liberties that have characterised Donald Trump’s second term of government, the assault on trans rights across American society have been particularly horrifying and far-reaching. From executive orders limiting gender-affirming care for young people to bans on trans people serving in the armed services. The demonisation and minimisation of the human experience of people on the basis of their gender alienates and endangers entire communities. It is culturally a pretty terrifying time to be a trans person in America. I was thinking about what that might mean as a backdrop to being a trans artist in America today – what it might feel like producing new work that can be personal and political and provocative but also unabashed, that needn’t represent an entire community or be consumed by trauma or have a responsibility to respond to a malignant government that’s denying your very existence. But great art thrives in response to tyranny, and great artists find ways to be funny and fierce and utterly themselves in the face of external forces beyond their control. Torrey Peters is all too aware of the weight of expectation, but with her new book she’s shown herself to be a great artist and ridiculously fun to read. Her 2021 novel Detransition, Baby was a sensation and a revelation. It follows the dynamics between three 30-something Brooklynites grappling with the idea of parenting and raising a child. That those three models of womanhood, motherhood and adulthood formed an unconventional triangle was more a question of setting than purely subject. Reese – a trans woman, Katrina - a cis woman, and Ames – who, in the book has detransitioned and is navigating life as a man after no longer being Amy. As a mainstream literary success story in the early 2020s, it was incredibly frank about the lives of its characters, charmingly unconcerned with explaining cultural specifics, localised terminology or social mores. It was just this irresistibly likeable comedy of manners. That it was a book by a major new trans writer was both precisely the point and completely beside the point. Torrey Peters’ debut was longlisted for the Women’s Prize in the UK, named one of the New York Times best books of the 21st century so far and was widely beloved and acclaimed. So. The follow-up. Stag Dance is a collection of four stories, each falling into a fairly specific genre. The first, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones is speculative fiction in an imagined gender apocalypse. Then, there is The Chaser, a teen romance one part Brideshead Revisited, one part literary twilight, with gender anxiety rather than vampires and werewolves. Third is the titular story – probably better described as a short novel– about a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit who plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women — jealousy and betrayal are almost inevitable. And finally, the last story, The Masker, a horror-infused, Las Vegas-set exploration of kink, betrayal and difficult choices. Each of the four stories is arresting and surprising in its own way. Each plays with genre and gender with equal flair and confidence. The language is precise, the voices are compelling. The world is unmistakably in conversation with the shitshow of contemporary politics and society, but it also sits outside and above it. Resolutely, thrillingly its own thing, this is a book of four stories – and an author – with big expansive ideas about the human experience and it’s a real treat. I’m Michael Williams, and this is Read This, a show about the books we love and the stories behind them. Of the four stories collected in Stag Dance both Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker were self published by Torrey almost a decade ago. They were published as independent novellas, part of a publishing project that Torrey extended to other trans writers who were unable to find homes for their writing otherwise. In interviews about Stag Dance Torrey has said she’s less interested in the binary between men and women, and more interested in the binary between cis people and trans people, and how false and reductive that idea is. In the book’s acknowledgements she refers to her “never-ending transition – otherwise known as ongoing trans life.” I wanted to begin with the book’s long gestation period, and the ways in which it reflects an evolving sensibility – an ongoing transition – for its author. MICHAEL: One of the products of that kind of genesis for this book is that it's a decade worth of work in the one book. And I'm curious about the ways in which when you look back over those first novellas, how much your appetite for what you want to do as a writer has changed, how much your capacity for what want to do as a writer has changed and how hard it was not to get under the hood and tinker and rewrite your earlier self. TORREY: Well, I had the permission to do so. I mean, I think I'm a better writer now. So I went back to go polish the sentences. And the thing is in 2016, I was like angrier than I was now. I was more like kind of punk and angry. And when I started polishing it, the thing is, it's hard to have polish and anger at the same time. And as I started the polishing the sentences, yeah, they were getting better but they were also getting less urgent. I mean, I was putting the book together in like 2020, three, 2024, where it was pre-Trump and pre what's happened in the UK. But I had like an inkling that it was coming and I was like, you know, if I'm gonna start this book with something, I wanna hand the mic to somebody who's angry and wants to speak about it. And that's really like myself from 10 years before. So I actually just got rid of all my changes, went back to the original. And the original was full of typos, because I was really of the belief that everybody should be writing and that the idea that you have to have an immaculate page is actually a thing that keeps people away from writing. MICHAEL: I like the typo as a punk, I think that's right. It's like, no, I'm not gonna turn off the little suggestion from Microsoft where I am too punk for that little line. TORREY: There were like some typos that were like pretty embarrassing. There was, I misspelled Columbia, which is a country I now live in. I spelled it like the university and like that really kind of confused the class origins of one character. But there aren't typos in this version. But at the time I was like, I want everybody to be writing. I want everyone to be telling their stories. And I think that like, you know, there were people I know who didn't go to college, and in fact, would be anxious, you know, even just crossing a college campus where like “I don't belong here.” I do have like you know a college education and I wanted to be like it doesn't matter. The reason you're writing for is to like move people. And I wanted, especially a lot of the trans girls who are around me, to not feel like, “oh, if it's not super polished, I can't put it into the world.” And it's like, no, you're mad, you've got something to say, put it in the world, and this is gonna be an example of that. MICHAEL: I'm interested in that younger self, like fueled by anger and urgency in the writing as well. I'm curious about the relationship between finding a writerly voice and finding a personal identity and the ways in which they dovetailed or the one was an expression of the other. TORREY: Well, I think this collection has a series of different voices, but I do think that I developed a kind of sensibility out of that, which has to do with not explaining myself very much. By the time I was writing Detransition, Baby, I'd gone through a series of fights with other trans women. I wasn't like, you know, sort of starry-eyed about the idea of easy solidarity along identity lines. You know, I understood that communities are constantly falling apart. People are having difficult times. And also I ran into plenty of trans people who don't like my writing, you know. So it wasn't like, I can't say I write for all trans people except for the like, you now, 30% who hate what I'm doing or something. So I began to think more about kind of affinity and you know, writing for people with whom I have affinity. And also the fact that like, a lot of the books that I was reading when I was writing Detransition, Baby were by cis women a little bit older than me. You know, I was reading, that was a time that Ferrante was really big and I was, and I realised I'm reading all these books by like divorced cis women because divorced cis women essentially went through something like a transition. They had to start their lives over and like not get bitter. And so I began to sort of think about writing as, when I say it's like to move people, it's also sometimes to speak back. You know early on I wanted to go back to all the trans women around me. I slowly began to want to speak back to like these divorced cis women who were writing books where they were asking questions just like mine, but slightly askance. And I wanted to be like, well, look at my perspective. And that sort of decision to speak but also to speak back without necessarily always explaining myself as though I'm the outsider. MICHAEL: It’s my favourite thing about your writing, and it hit me with Detransition Baby, which was the first of yours that I read, but is the exhilarating thing of the confidence of saying, no, this is the world the story exists in. And it's your job, whether it's lumberjack slang, or whether it is the very particular conversations going on in a trans family in New York, or whatever it is, you can be a reader wherever and catch up with this at your own speed. TORREY: Yeah, and I think I give readers credit for being able to do it. I think it's kind of condescending to readers to basically be like, let me slow down for you and essentially ruin the momentum of a story because I actually think you're too stupid to understand it. I tend to give my readers credit. There was like a really funny tweet when Detransition, Baby came out of like this Grandfather sending his grandson a series of “What is a twink? What is a bareback? What is like… all these different…” And it was like that’s what I want. You have resources for figuring out. That grandfather, his resource was apparently his grandson by text. MICHAEL: It’s probably better for his search history, that he went to his grandson, like it’s probably for the best. TORREY: I just give people credit for it and I think that that sensibility shows up even now. In this new book, the biggest piece in it is written in lumberjack slang, which I don't explain at all. And so people are like, oh, you didn't explain the trans terms. And it's, like, well, I didn't even explain obscure lumberjack slang that, like nobody knows, you know? And that some of it has given me the confidence to basically be like, you just get in it, you go hard, and actually if you're doing that people will keep up whether you're trans Brooklyn or whether you’re doing turn of the century lumberjack dances. MICHAEL: This is a digression, but I'm curious, as a reader, is that what you like to be thrown in? Do you gravitate towards books that encourage you to do the work to meet them? TORREY: I mean, sometimes. You know, I think that the thing is like I've been trained to have the books be easy for me and I've been trained by school to think that if I don't understand every single word, I'm like somehow failing the book and I think that that's not my natural inclination. Sometimes people will tell me like with the lumberjack stuff that I read this book the way that I felt when I was a kid, when you're reading a book when you were a kid and you just like don't know one word per sentence. The most magical reading I had for myself as a kid was often the times where I was like trying so hard to build a world and being like, “I think this is what that word means, I think this is that word.” But there was like all this possibility and all this texture to it. And my joke is that like, oftentimes when you don't understand things that people are telling you, you’ll like pay attention to so much more things and you’ll end up with like a much more textured experience. Like when I go to the car mechanic, you know, he opens up the hood of the car and he's like. Your alternator is something, something with the camshaft and this or that. And it's like, I'm struggling to understand what you're telling me, but I sure do know that I'm at the car mechanic right now. You know, like the experience of being at the car mechanic is incredibly vivid because I have so little idea of what you are saying. And I think that there's like that is actually a really interesting experience and language that is not so frequently captured in what is often valued in language right now, which is either language that is quite transparent or readers that are so knowledgeable that they can like read a whole passage of Joyce and know every single reference. There's something interesting about struggling and about creating context and texture and possibilities that might not exactly be what the author is saying or that might not be correct. MICHAEL: One of the ways you get to do exactly that so effectively in Stag Dance is through genre as well like so you mentioned speculative fiction but you know there's also horror there's teen romance. By playing with genre you've got convention which helps set up expectation and then you've got the freedom to take that where you take it. TORREY: That's absolutely right. That's very well said. I mean, like, and some of it is that like these genres have been so developed that it saves me a lot of work. In Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones like there are these guys on the road who are like hunting the main character. It's like, if you've read The Road by Cormac McCarthy, if you've seen Mad Max or whatever, you don't really need to explain their motivations. You can just be like, they're hunters on the road and just like gesture. That was great. That would have been a whole chapter of explaining something that everybody already knows. And I can just sort of like point over there and be like, yeah, you know, those guys. And then get on with what I care about, which is the relationship between the two women in the book, which, you know, there are people who want to know everything about those hunters on the road and they want to that entire world and I discovered I'm not that kind of writer. MICHAEL: Tell me about the choice of teen romance as a set of generic conventions that are useful to play in. TORREY: Well, I like the fact that teens don't know anything. That sounds condescending, but I mean it actually with a lot of respect. At the time, like, you know, people were talking about trans stuff and it was just, nobody was hearing each other. Everybody had their sort of arguments that they'd already pre-digested and they're just sort of like bumping their pre-digested arguments into each other when it came to trans stuff, nobody was convincing each other of anything. And I was thinking about the last time that happened, I think, in a massive way in the United States was over the Vietnam War. And that out of that came new journalism where journalists were sort of like, I can't tell you facts and figures anymore because nobody believes them. There's no shared reality in these kinds of facts. And so journalists started taking the techniques of novelists, John Didion, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and they started writing sort of things that were like, let me just try and get to an emotional truth and then nevermind all of the facts and figures around it. Something similar has happened with not just trans stuff, but with any kind of identity sort of thing. As soon as a reader says, this is a story about misogyny, Everyone's sort of got this like sort of liberal arts discourse-y analysis that can just be like snapped onto it. This is a story about homophobia, snaps in place. You know, certainly transphobia, the same thing. And so one of the things that was fun was writing. Number one is it’s fun to write from the perspective of like a bro. That was fun. And like having a bro who didn't know anything about his own emotions, but then two, to not have him understand his own feelings meant that If he doesn't know what he's feeling exactly, it's harder for a reader to come in with their pre-digested analysis. And then you just have to feel what he is feeling. So the teen romance story is a story of a kind of bro, athlete, cis white guy who starts hooking up with his roommate. And it's unclear what his roommate is. They end up treating each other cruelly. They love each other. He can't admit that he loves his roommate, but they love each. And you could say like, well, is he cruel and in love because he thinks that Robbie is a boy and he's secretly gay and this is a homophobic story? Is he cruel because Robbie's very feminine and he disdains femininity? And this is the story of misogyny. If you know that this is written by Tory, you could say well, maybe Robbie's a pre-transition trans girl and this was a story of transphobia. Actually, it's all of those things and none of those things all at once. And so you actually just get to sort of the emotions that this character is going through without quite being able to name them. And therefore you can't sort of bring a lot of your pre-digested analyses to what's happening. And my hope then is what you discover is the character who's supposed to be the trans character, Robbie, the feminine roommate, has all the things that the strong cis character is supposed to have. That character has agency, that character is able to state his desires, able to sort of carry through a plan. And the character who's supposed to be the sort of like strong, centred character has all the hallmarks of a trans character, where there's a big gap between how he wants to be and how the world perceives him. And he's trying to close that gap through performance, through acting out in a certain way. He's full of shame. He's sort of stuck in that he knows he needs to make some sort of big move, but he can't make that big move. And as a result, both love and sex are closed off to him in the way they might be to somebody who is trans, but pre-transition or something like that. Like those things that are supposed to be trans are actually things that the cis character goes through, which is kind of my larger point, that like we're all kind of going through this stuff. MICHAEL: I think that's what I love about that story is the sense of uncertainty and play isn't just for your characters, but it is also an active engagement with your readers and their expectation of what they get from a Torrey Peters story as well. That in this collection, and I might be wrong, but I would say you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of characters who identify as trans, that doesn't mean that their relationship to their gender, to their identity, to all this stuff isn't actively in play but it's not about self-identified trans identities. TORREY: Yeah, I'm actually very uninterested in trans identity. The longer I've been trans, the less I know what it means to be trans. And for me being trans is like, I'm kind of standing with a bunch of other people and we have each other's backs, you know, in a sort of political way, but in a, sort of like ontological, like, are we the same in some, like, you know deep, deep way? Like, no, I don't necessarily see that we are. This person has come from the East, and I've come from the West, and you know, I have people arriving at this place from all cardinal directions, from all different types of experiences, metaphorically speaking. And I don't understand many other people's experiences. I don't understand, like, you call yourself trans, but like, it was because you talked to your therapist and your therapist suggested it and it sounded good to you, well, like that sounds totally alien to me, given my experience, and somebody else's experience. And what I've been through sounds totally alien and weird to them, other than we're all here. So I don't really know what it means to be trans. And then once I say, I don't really know it means it means be trans, then it doesn't really matter whether you call yourself trans or not. I'm just kind of interested in the experience of, oh, you have weird gender feelings and you're like interested in essentially having my back or me having your back or us understanding each other. So I don’t really care what you call it. I'm just interested in what those experiences might be that got you here. Recently I ended up on a Reddit that had to do with Ozempic and making your own Ozempic or your own GLP-1, whatever those things are. And the formats in the Reddit discussions were almost the same as what you find in a trans Reddit. Whereas before and after photos, arguments about whether or not one should conform to these conventional beauty standards. The trans version is like, why should I have to pass? Why should I not get to feel beautiful in this way? Why should I have to take hormones? Why should you have to take hormones to be trans? All these things that… so the experiences are like emotionally so resonant and the identities have nothing to do with one another. I feel the same thing when I look at so many of the men that are out in the world today where I'm like, you're really mad because you want to be seen and with your gender in a certain way and you're failing at this gender. And it hurts your feelings and you're mad about it. You know, like you want to be a rugged man and then you go on the dating apps and everybody says you’re four inches too short and you are furious about it and so you go and you get like a, you know, home construction supplies that you stack around you to sort of compensate for that. You know and I'm making fun of it but like that's also the trans experience. You feel like your body doesn't do a certain thing, you wish it would and you got a bunch of accoutrements to surround you to make it look a certain way. We're all doing it, we're all kind of failing at it, and I'm interested in the people who have the guts to look at this and be like, what's going on? Many of the characters in these stories, I think, I'm seeing them through that lens rather than through naming them along their identity. MICHAEL: I really love that, but I wonder how complicated that is by becoming the visible face of trans literature and the representative voice of, you know, the ways in which you are claimed by others or stuff is ascribed to you after the success of Detransition, Baby. Does it make it that much harder not to have to be “the good trans voice, the giver of advice”? Do you think about yourself differently off the back of the stratospheric fame that is Detransition, Baby? TORREY: Well, I think that the nice thing is that Detransition, Baby did well enough that the publishers gave a bunch of other trans women a chance. I can think of like 15 other trans women who have books out in the States this spring. I can think of a handful of others in the UK. I wish I was more up to date on who's getting published here in Australia and I apologise for not knowing that. But the more people that are out there, the more I get to be my own like idiosyncratic weirdo, you know, and that's the freedom I want for myself. And I think that while I was doing Detransition, Baby I had to be a little bit more buttoned up. But the success of it has opened up things enough that I can just point to other people. You want a story about that kind of representation? Here's five, right? I mean, we haven't even talked about the lumberjack story, but I think nobody would say, like, the representative story of the trans experience in the 21st century in the United States is a bunch of 19th century lumberjacks putting on a dance, wearing triangles over their crotchets. Like, that's not, and that's sort of… MICHAEL: I think they're saying it now TORREY: Yeah, and I'm sorry about that. Coming up after the break, Torrey reveals the genesis behind her title story and explains why you have to truly love someone to be cruel to them. We’ll be right back. [Advertisement] TORREY: Brunswick Bob's voice carried through the stunted spruce saplings that held fast the banks of the ravine. I neared and saw that he was potlatching with Mickels and Stubb Nelson. In the snow between the three knelt a fourth figure. It was Leeson, a pretty whistle-punk from somewhere in Scandihoovia. Old timber beasts like Mickels took a special pleasure in ordering Leeson about, making him scamper to fetch this or that. But at night, Leeson liked to do a strange thing. While other men sprawled down to roll the guff, Leeson would pull out a little book he had, a diary of sorts, filled with blank pages, and without asking leave, he'd select a man and begin to sketch him, holding a pencil in his fine, slim hands that made a set with the fine bones of his cheek and jaw, which slanted at just the same angle as his glinting eyes as he stared brazen at his chosen Jack. He never once selected me for his drawing diary which I told myself was no matter because in fact his sauciness disturbed me, or rather I was disturbed by the unctuous temptation it engendered in me, a queer need like how it feels to forget the perfect word for something, even as you know somewhere in your mind you must have the word, that you don't lack it at all, only its use. As a consequence, I was stilted in Leeson's presence, which made the needy lacking feeling worse, and my stiltiness clearly amused him so that his lips lifted into a saucy smirk as if he understood something I didn't, and him being so amused at me struck me as ever the more saucy… We couldn’t resist giving you a taste of the “lumberjack slang” that defines her title story of this book, Stag Dance. It’s Torrey giving it a read and it’s the longest in the collection. It’s also maybe the most fun, allowing Torrey to flex her impressive skills as a stylist, and the whole thing is kind of mischievous rather than sanctimonious. To fully appreciate the complexity of the story, I asked Torrey to set up for us the genesis of Stag Dance. TORREY: A stag dance is something that men would do, when they were working camps that were like all male, like mining camps, rail camps, some civil war battalions, and logging camps, like way out in the woods, they'd be working, all men, they get lonely, and they would put on dances where some of the men would to attend the dance as women. And the loggers specifically would cut a triangle of brown fabric, like maybe three inches to a hypotenuse, and they would turn it upside down so it was inverted, and then they'd put it over their crotch. And the symbolism is probably evident to anybody listening to this podcast. And then they would go to the dance as women. And I was just like, I love this because, I mean, not only is it just like so on the nose, where it's like, this is transition, like broken down to its like most basic symbol. But also the fact that it's like an upside down triangle which has resonances with like the second world war, with like, the reclaimed upside down triangle and like HIV activism. And here it was like with Lumberjacks doing it. MICHAEL: So weird that echo of history and how, like if you'd made it up, it would have felt a bit contrived. TORREY: Totally, it would have been like, “Oh, come on, Torrey.” But it was like, no, they did that. And so the story is about Babe Bunyan. And in the States, there's this tradition tall tales. And one of them is about Paul Bunyan, who was like the greatest logger in the country. If you like drive to certain parts of the Midwest, like Wisconsin and Minnesota, on the roadside stands, you'll see this like statue of this like big, bearded man and like a red flannel with an axe. And that's Paul Bunyan, the greatest logger, and he was like, you know, a giant. And he had a giant, also a giant blue ox named Babe. So the main character of my book is named Babe Bunyan which is a nickname given to him by other loggers because he's as tall and as good with an axe as Paul Bunyon and he's just as ugly as Paul Bunyan. He's got a face like Paul Bunyan's, the big blue ox. And the story is about what happens when Babe Bunyan decides to go to the Stag Dance as one of the women. And like the way it throws the entire, uh, camp into disarray and he, he ends up into like, in like a rivalry with like the youngest, prettiest, uh, kind of camp punk and yeah, and things kind of just go from there. MICHAEL: It's such a wonderful story and such a, such an exciting kind of shift from you as a writer as well, because while it carries all the hallmarks of what, at this point, two books in we've come to know and love as your style, it's also entirely its own thing. And that's partly about language and partly about the voice you found. How did you find your way into that voice? TORREY: Well, I was I was building a sauna in the woods. MICHAEL: Good, that was exactly what I thought the answer would be, so... TORREY: So I like, you know, there were a couple of things that happened. Like the sort of reception to Detransition, Baby was a little bit overwhelming. And I like had a couple different responses to that. One was to start spending more time out of the city. And I got really into sauna and I was like, and like the proper like Finnish style sauna, like what makes for a good sauna. So I decided I was gonna build a really good Finnish sauna and I don't know that much about construction or anything. So I started learning about tools and then also I had to start like learn to chainsaw to clear a place for the sauna and also to make firewood. So I began like learning that's a spruce, that's the maple, that's you know, learning my trees. So the area in which I was doing it was a former logging country. And so I was like, and I was dirty and I was uncomfortable all the time. And I was a little bit like, thinking about my gender as I was in the woods, like I'm doing this, these very typically masculine things of cutting down trees with chainsaws, and how do I feel about my gender. So that was on my mind. And it was also feeling like all of this pressure to follow up Detransition, Baby in a sort of, you know, domestic comedy kind of sphere and not feeling like I had the thing to follow it up. And then I was thinking also kind of like about, what if I just did a really different voice? Maybe that would free me up. And then, I found this book published in 1941 and it's a collection of logger slang collected by the children of loggers, which I normally would have like totally ignored, except that I was building the sauna and thinking about logging. And the language was so interesting and weird. You know, I'm used to sort of like cowboy language and as an American or like Southern language, but it was something like really different and just like totally gone. And so the examples of words would be like, I mean, the one I always say because it's sort of easy to see just like the weird patterns of thought that are behind it. It's cackleberry for an egg, because like a hen cackles and then it lays an egg and you have to like find it and pick it like a berry. So that's your cackleberry. A preacher is a sky pilot because it guides you to heaven. Your hand is a lunch hook because you sort of scoop your lunch and hook it into your mouth. Chewing tobacco is Scandihoovian dynamite. I don't know why they say Scandihoovia instead of Scandinavia, but it's just really fun. There were so many kind of strange expressions that just felt like very lived in. Like when you had dinner with like all the other men, it was a symphony in tin because everybody's just, they're eating so fast with their tin dishes that there's just the sound of tin on tin. Yeah, I read it and I was like, oh, not only did I like that, I see how it is to live this. So I was looking to follow up, interested in logging and I was also under all these expectations to follow up. And I was like, well, what if I just wrote a book in logger slang and came up with like a logger dialect, nobody's expecting it. Probably nobody wants it. And in a weird way that like frees me up to like actually have fun again writing. And so I started it and I kind of wanted to do like an Americana syntax, like, you know, sometimes somewhere between like Melville and Cormac McCarthy, like that's sort of like King James rhythms, but like didn't quite get it right. And so I found this weird like syntax and cadence and put all those pieces together and found that I was just like having a really good time. MICHAEL: It's so good to read and it that language has this kind of baroque play to it that's an odds with the expectation of a kind of inarticulate stoicism, that the two pull in opposite directions on the one hand you have the sheer poetry of a symphony in tin, and then you have people who you assume are conditioned not to say what they want or need or who they are. TORREY: Part of the fun of it was to actually give Babe an excess of language, you know? That the excess of the language actually had to do with some part of his muteness around his desires. You know, it's like, I can say all these things, but I'm circling around the thing that I actually want. That sort of flooredness of everything around it kind of shows what is difficult to say or what needs to be sort of said in new ways. MICHAEL: A few times before you mentioned characters being cruel to one another and actually I think across all your work you're one of the best writers I've ever read on the interplay between cruelty and intimacy and the ways in which the two of them are part of the same thing. TORREY: Yeah, I think you have to, like, love somebody in a certain way to be, like truly cruel to them, or at least you have understand them. And, like certainly, I think that, like cruelty has an aspect of betrayal to it. And you know, to be betrayed, you have like trust and know somebody. I think for something like Detransition, Baby, the sort of structuring relationship is like mothers and daughters. For this book I would say it's sisters and the ways that like your sister is a person who you go to who can understand you who comes from where you come from, has seen you from when you're young if you make a change they're like well that's you now but I know everywhere you've come from and there's like a… such a safety in that but also that's the person you're most vulnerable to. That's the person who can betray you, who can... can knife you most cruelly. And so almost everybody in this book, no matter their gender, they end up as sisters. Like Babe Bunyan and Leeson, who's like the pretty boy in camp, they become. And part of this is, it's meant to be a little bit funny that there's this big, strong logger and he's essentially sisterly with the young, pretty, pretty boy. MICHAEL: And never more sisterly than when, ultimately, they're in competition. TORREY: Yes. MICHAEL: That that becomes the marker of acceptance, isn't solidarity, it's recognition of rivalry. TORREY: The character says, like, to be rivals is to be something the same, you know, and he's almost proud when he can be in the same league of contention as Leeson, and they end up competing for the affections of the camp boss. And I do think that that's oftentimes, like you know the way that desire triangulates. It's like, well, how do I know if I'm pretty? The prettier girl is looking for this guy. And so if I get the guy, no matter what people say about me, if I get the guy I must ergo be the prettiest. Really what I'm talking about underneath all of it is my relationships with other trans women, you know? And like the ways that we negotiate what it means to be trans, what it means to be feminine, the scarcity of resources that are available for us. Trans women are my sisters and they're also the people that can hurt me the most. MICHAEL: I knew after Detransition, Baby, I wanted to read anything you wrote. After Stag Dance, I now can no longer confidently say what a Torrey Peter's novel looks like, but I know I wanna read it even more than ever. It's been such a treat to have you in here today. TORREY: Thank you so much for having me. Torrey Peters’s latest book is Stag Dance and it’s available everywhere now. And if you haven’t yet read Detransition, Baby yet, go back to that as well. It is excellent. And if you’re in or around the Sydney area, Torrey will be at Sydney Writers Festival this weekend, swf.org.au. [Advertisement] Before we get out of here I wanted to let you know what else I’ve been reading this week and long-time listeners to the show might know I am a bit of a crime fiction junkie. I couldn’t resist picking up the new Dervla McTiernan. She’s Perth based, Irish born. She’s returned to her detective hero, Cormac Reilly. This is her fourth Cormac Reilly book. It’s called The Unquiet Grave and it’s terrific. It’s available at your local independent bookstore or library. That’s it for this week’s show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends about it – and rate and review us. It helps a lot. Read This is a Schwartz Media production made possible by the generous support of ARA Group. The show is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zoltan Fecso. Our transcripts are edited by Posy McCaughey. Thanks for listening. See you next week. Embed Link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/torrey-peters-never-ending-transition/id1691035626?i=1000709313180&itscg=30200Woff: Michael sits down with Torrey to discuss the genesis of <em>Stag Dance</em> and why she isn’t interested in trans identity.Author: Read ThisApple News: {"edition_hold":false,"featureable":true,"node_changed":1747868697,"publish_date":1747760040,"sections":["5f599232-5ebf-41dd-fce3-05ae04eb7551","b55c3d85-fa8b-4a8c-b076-3a3b8330011e"],"status":true}Host: Michael WilliamsGuests: Torrey Peters