Love in Exile

A Sunday Times (London) bestseller. Named a Most Anticipated Book by Vogue, Vulture, and ELLE UK.

"Uncommonly wise and honest. Love in Exile flooded me with a sense of continuity and hope. A masterpiece from start to finish." ―Maggie Nelson, author of Like Love

"Should be required reading for anyone who wants to join a dating app, love ethically, or experience true partnership with other humans." ―Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood and The Dry Season

A disarmingly wry treatise-cum-memoir on love in a lonely age by a celebrated thinker and columnist for Vogue.

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.

The subsequent investigation, Love in Exile, boldly reframes love’s elusiveness as a collective question. Conversationally frank and intellectually ambitious, these eight voice-driven essays unpack the norms governing love in our time with the insight of a shrewd outsider. Here, Faye examines her breakups with cis men alongside lessons from Lana Del Rey and Alain de Botton, explores the lovelessness that fueled her time as an addict, tackles the relationship between feminine self-worth and motherhood, and finally attempts to discover genuine self-acceptance.

The result is a dive into universal, deeply felt questions about love, reframed through a radical, revolutionary perspective. Written with the humor and rigor that made Faye an internationally bestselling writer, Love in Exile is a thrilling reckoning with love in our time.