The acclaimed Top 10 Sunday Times best-seller on our search for love 'Uncommonly wise and
honest. Love in Exile flooded me with a sense of continuity and hope. A masterpiece from start
to finish' - Maggie Nelson 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.
