Love in Exile by Shon Faye review – lessons in romance

Is heartbreak all capitalism’s fault? Faye mixes the personal and political in this exposing but generous memoir

Sometimes, if you are a straight woman, it can be tempting to see your sexuality as a curse. It is a cliche to talk about the uselessness of men, but I do it anyway: it is a neat way of avoiding the fact that I too can be selfish and cruel to the men who go out with me. Writing in the New Inquiry in& 2019, Asa Seresin used the term “heteropessimism” to refer to this tendency among straight women. As Seresin points out, this way of thinking is not terribly helpful, because it is really an abdication of responsibility. If men are irredeemable, and loving men is always going to make women unhappy, then we don’t have to attempt the difficult work of trying to make our relationships more equitable.

What makes Shon Faye’s memoir about love so refreshing is that it resists heteropessimism, and tries to do something more hopeful. Faye is& a& trans woman who spent years convinced that she would always be an “exile” from the closed world of heterosexual romance, but the idea she puts forward in this book is that this sense of exclusion is not unique to her. Faye argues that, collectively, we ask too much of romantic love: we expect it to solve all of our problems and when, inevitably, it doesn’t live up to the hype, we feel excluded from the “happy kingdom” of successful partnership. Instead of blaming men for love’s disappointments, Faye analyses her breakups to try to imagine better ways of approaching relationships. This is a memoir but it is& also a kind of self-help book. Faye is trying to teach herself – and her reader – how to love in a different way.