BOTH: Torrey Peters is writing a "queer financial thriller", "Big Short meets Great Gatsby meets Queer Literature", saying "queer & finance usually never go together". Why are QT authors reluctant to write about finance? (As opposed to GCFs for whom the financial status of women is a huge concern?)

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[–]HouseplantWomen who disagree with QT are a different sex 11 insightful - 1 fun11 insightful - 0 fun12 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Finance makes for boring fiction.

[–]MarkTwainiac 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I dunno. The story of Midas has endured. Also, Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities was a pretty good novel. Wall Street was an excellent fiction movie. And whilst ostensibly nonfiction, Liar's Poker was IMO one of the most gripping, informative & entertaining books of the past 50 years. Then there's the wonderful movie It's A Wonderful Life, about bankers both good & evil.

Also: the terrific comedies Trading Places and the feminist-leaning films about Wall Street about smart working-class women succeeding in high finance against all odds, Working Girl starring Melanie Griffith and The Associate starring Whoopie Goldberg.

Finally: The Wolf of Wall Street, Boiler Room, Margin Call, The Big Short, The Hudsucker Proxy and Rogue Trader.

[–]loveSloaneDebate King 10 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 0 fun11 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I think those are less about “finance” and more about intrigue/scandal in the finance world.

You gotta have some type of twist or gimmick to sell a story based on the financial world. Midas endures because he turned people into gold. That’s something that has far reaching consequences and can lead to interesting conflict, if every thing he touched remained the same but he just kept making more money nobody would care.

Wolf of Wall Street is a great movie- because the dude was on drugs and cheating and just a general cad

It’s A Wonderful Life is more well known for starting that trope of an angel showing someone what the world would be like without them in it and the whole “lasso the moon” thing than the banker aspect

I guess I’m saying you make a fair point but there’s always something more than just finance that makes these stories compelling. Nobody wants to read about an accountant that just… goes to work. Unless he’s embezzling or something. And I don’t want to watch a movie about a bank unless it’s getting robbed.

[–]HouseplantWomen who disagree with QT are a different sex 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

True, true. Tbh haven’t read over half of those and can’t sit down for long enough to watch anything.

[–]loveSloaneDebate King 11 insightful - 1 fun11 insightful - 0 fun12 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I mean… what does finance go with? Lol

I think most people are reluctant to write fiction about finance because what is there to write about? Sounds like a boring ass book

[–]ISaidWhatISaid[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I don't know, people associate finance with rich people and wealth, and those are topics many find highly intruiging.

[–]worried19 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I imagine most people just find the subject matter boring.

I wonder if Torrey Peters is going to put a shitload of misogynistic sexualized violence in this new book, too. The author makes me sick, not for being trans, but for this kind of crap:

https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/a-slap-in-the-face

[–]HouseplantWomen who disagree with QT are a different sex 10 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 0 fun11 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Oh god it’s that predator? This novel will mention the word finance six times and the rest will be a porny self insert fantasy about gender (navel gazing) and abuse of women. I could wipe my ass over five hundred pages and you’d have better writing.

[–]ISaidWhatISaid[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I was myself very put off by the review of Peters' book that appeared in Bookforum. For example this part:

This is not a social novel in the strict sense, because there’s no problem at its heart beyond the immutable problem of coexistence. Peters shows that fiction as an art form has a relationship to fiction as a misrepresentation, either as the result of miscommunication or a deliberate lie, and establishes her as a foremost specialist in situations in which they become difficult to distinguish from one another. Courtesy Emma Kohlmann and V1 Gallery

"Sexy damange", I would almost think that this Bookforum author was trolling, like they want to say "mutilation" but can't due to Artforum being a woke publication, so this is their compromise. As for this part, "establishes her as a foremost specialist in situations in which they become difficult to distinguish from one another", that's a very roundabout away for saying that it's a book about gaslighting, and the thrill that the main character in the book gets from lying to people and getting away with it, especially weaponizing social coercion and peer pressure to get their targets to go along with their "family planning", I guess.

Reese’s damage is the sexiest, and Peters opens Detransition, Baby with a full blast of it. Reese has a genuine desire to be a mom, but she also has a genuine desire for disrespectful married men. Her trysts with other people’s husbands and wish for a child of her own are related but incompatible. We meet Reese adrift in the feeling that she has missed her only chance at motherhood, which was back with Amy, who no longer even exists. Reese may not know what to do with her desire to mother, but she is highly skilled at reconfiguring it through sex. She and an HIV-positive suitor married to a cis woman, for example, joke about forgoing condoms and “knocking her up.” The notional “danger” of exposing her to the virus turns into something proximate to the “danger” of conception: Reese runs the risk of creating something.

So this book actually conflates getting AIDS with getting pregnant?

And this part just goes to show how oblivious the Bookforum reviewer is to whoever the intended reader is:

In one of the book’s first really astonishing paragraphs, Reese sends the husband “one of the sexiest, but most ostensibly non-sexual, sexts of her life—a short video of her cramming a couple of her big blue Truvada pills into one of those distinctive pastel birth control day-of-the-month clamshell cases.”

Jo Livingstone doesn't even explain what Truvada is, because obviously whoever reads this review must already know what that is. When authors take such liberties of not bothering to explain anything for their fellow already-initiated fans, those liberties apparently extent to their reviewers as well.

Amy is afraid of self-pity, for example, but frames her fear in cultural terms, refusing to become “a trans version of those Didion-worshipping bourgeois white girls who subscribed to a Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain, those minor-wound-dwelling brooders with no particular difficulties but for an inchoate sense of their own wronged-ness.”

I don't even understand what's being said here. Can someone explain that wordsalad quote to me and give me an example IRL?

Jo Livingstone was awarded the 2020 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

"Excellence in Reviewing" LMAO!