'We ache for love but love eludes us. Out of this crisis comes so much of what it means to be
human'Shon Faye grew up quietly obsessed with the feeling that love was not for her. Not just
romantic love: the secret fear of her own unworthiness penetrated every aspect and corner of
her life. It was a fear that would erupt in destructive counterfeit versions of the real love
she craved: addictions and short-lived romances that were either euphoric and fantastical or
excruciatingly painful and unhinged often both. Faye's experience of the world as a trans
woman who grew up visibly queer exacerbated her fears. But as she confronted her damaging
ideas about love and lovelessness she came to realize that this sense of exclusion is
symptomatic of a much larger problem in our culture. Love she argues is as much a collective
question as a personal one. Yet our collective ideals of love have developed in a society which
is itself profoundly sick and loveless in which consumer capitalism sells us ever new
engrossing fantasies of becoming more loved or lovable. In this highly politicized terrain
boundaries are purposefully drawn to keep some in and to keep others out. Those who exist
outside them are ignored denigrated exiled. In Love in Exile Shon Faye shows love is much
greater than the narrow ideals we have been taught to crave so desperately that we are willing
to bend and break ourselves to fit them. Wise funny unsparing and suffused with a radical
clarity this is a book of and for our times: for seeing and knowing love in whatever form it
takes is the meaning of life itself.
