The Brooklyn Rail

In her new memoir Love In Exile, UK writer Shon Faye reckons with her struggles of finding, receiving, and accepting love. Faye approaches this topic from a predominantly political lens to understand her own life and choices, with each chapter covering a different site for love-bearing relationships such as mothers, community, addiction, and self-love. Much like in her first book The Transgender Issue, Faye seamlessly dissects and integrates the work of other writers. Here she turns to the likes of bell hooks, Mark Fisher, Germaine Greer, and Eva Illouz, the latter of whom states in The End of Love that the burden or success of heterosexual relationships falls on women’s psyches, evident from the many recent texts on this genre, including Faye’s.

Love In Exile opens with the author’s retelling of her first heartbreak. “The banal universality of heartbreak came as a unique relief…. For once, there was no ‘diversity and inclusion’ training needed for people to empathise with me.” Unlike her transness, heartbreak was easily understood by others. She illuminates the fissures of her relationship with her ex, B, largely through metaphors that pertain to forcing a material to fit into a shape or mold it should not be in. Assumedly, this is to maintain privacy, but it makes for a slightly unmoored opening. In a later chapter, Faye renders dalliances with the specificity craved earlier. She writes quip summarizations of the sites and dynamics of her hook ups—think three-in-one body hair wash in the apartment— before proceeding to analyze her sexual agency and womens’ engagement in self commodification: “The pressure to own and embody ‘sexiness’ in order to consolidate my social value has led to my deep confusion and angst about which aspects of my sex life have come from the things that I want for myself, and which are about the things that are wanted from me, typically by the men I fuck.” Faye doesn’t land at any resolve from these observations, but refreshingly is content just voicing them.

In the second essay, “System Failure,” Faye introduces the essence of this memoir, with what she terms the “crisis of expectation” in love-bearing relationships. Whereas historically, romantic commitments were entered for financial and social security, today “romantic relationships are often aspired to by women primarily because of the promise of emotional reciprocity and closeness.” Faye continues, “Sadly, making women happy was never part of the heterosexual project—where it happens, it is a by-product, not the main aim.” Referencing Alain de Botton’s argument that we train for everything in life except love, Faye concurrently used to view love as “instinctive and transformative.”

Faye frequently attributes the strains on such relationships to the loss of community spaces: labor unions, civic associations, religious groups, and social spaces such as pubs, clubs, libraries, and community centers. With these losses, “the romantic couple has become even more important as our central unit of meaning,” she adds, “greater precarity and gloominess of our working lives have made our love lives such a state of anxiety.” Faye’s interest in Love In Exile lies not in investigating her relationship with therapy language that has entered mainstream vernacular, but instead in looking at what has materially changed around us to introduce obstacles to relationships and make them more fragile.

In “Mother,” Faye looks at the idea and institution of motherhood, “a site we both worship and denigrate.” She describes her relationship with her own mother as “central to my earliest understanding of what love is,” before dissecting the eroding state support for single mothers and how motherhood is used as a tool for the recruitment of women towards the far right and anti-transness movements in the UK and US: “No amount of calling trans women ‘men’ on Mumsnet will improve the life of an isolated and exhausted mother. This is because her problems are not caused or even obscured by trans people, but by the way a heterosexual, patriarchal, and capitalist society has devalued her body, her mind, and her work.” A particularly pertinent essay given the repealing of trans rights in both countries, Faye’s straddling of memoir, analysis, and political critique thrives as she contends with the politicization of motherhood while discussing proudly growing up in a matriarchal family, and her own feelings on having children.

In the essay “In Community,” Faye turns her attention to the relationship least valued by the state and in heterosexual culture: “In this world, friendship, an elective relationship entered into only for the purposes of mutual affirmation and pleasure, is an affront to productivity.” Consequently, for friendship there is “no tax break, no special inheritance rule, no bereavement leave.” Certainly, the closest an employer or state gets to recognizing the significance of a friend is an emergency contact.

In “On Self,” Faye stands against the often preached notion of self-love coming before loving others, writing, “Our loving bonds with other people can be a healing space in which we gain the insight and the courage to show ourselves love.” She’s cautious against a broad interpretation of self-love that gives room to self centeredness and self-indulgence: “‘Caring for yourself’ can mean anything to anyone: from an inducement to luxurious pampering, to an excuse for ignoring the rolling news coverage of the mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.” Self-care within capitalism, she reminds us, often promotes individualism and consumption, taking attention away from the real struggles of affordable housing, job security, and freedom from harassment.

If Faye is wary of neat solutions to the crisis of expectations in love-bearing relationships in Love In Exile, then the last chapter, “Agape,” reads as an unanticipated swerve. Here the author reflects on her recent faith-based relationship to God, where she finds unconditional love. It’s unexpected, though her lexicon choice throughout the book nods to faith: the “salvific power” of friendships, our expectations for romantic relationships to “save us,” and romantic love becoming “a replacement religion for a secular age.” Faye clarifies for US readers: “In Britain, we do not have the politically connected, right-wing religious lobby of the United States. Despite having a state religion and a king supposedly anointed by God, most of us consider religion a deeply private matter.” She appears on the defense, writing a final chapter on faith for a book that otherwise seeks to be grounded in capitalist critique.

If the genre of memoir pressures a writer to arrive somewhere new after the journey of the text, then Faye returns to refuting this in her afterword: “Writing about love is rarely permitted ambivalence.” She isn’t convinced that her own critical journey has changed her outcomes. During the writing of this book, she suffered another heartbreak and was “shocked by just how little resilience” she had acquired. The lasting message from Love In Exile is happily not any takeaway tools, but instead the hammered reminder of the vulnerability of structures and places across generations for people to find love in friendship, family, community, and the essential human need to convene.