You can fall in love with a person’s outline, you can even create a home with it, but there will come a time when you can’t ignore the bones beneath their flesh. No one is less than two things.
At thirty years old and with a life full of dysphoria and ex-boyfriends she can’t get out of her head, Max feels a deep disenchantment. Shouldn’t these be the best years of her life? Why don’t they seem like it? After falling down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to change. And the first change will be to try a bit of classic heteronormativity.
Max thinks she has found the answer in Vincent, a lawyer whose colleagues, friends, and family can’t imagine him dating a trans woman, although he likes Max in a way she has always thought was an absurd fantasy. But Vincent also carries his own problems. When Max finds out what happened in Thailand with another girl, she must discover what forgiveness really means. Are we more than our worst mistakes? Is it possible to reconcile with the past?
Funny, clever, and moving, Decepcióname is a powerful exploration of love, loss, trans panic, race, millennial anxiety, and the relationships (both family and romantic) that make us who we are.
“Nicola Dinan’s first novel, The Vulnerability of You and Me, was a magnificent story about platonic relationships and first love. In Decepcióname, Dinan builds a very clever portrait through romance to tell the story of Max, a thirty-year-old trans woman who is tired of her life.” -VULTURE
“Decepcióname is smart, funny, and sharp. I was especially surprised by how realistic it is, as it manages to capture all kinds of contradictory and complicated feelings in a haze of natural prose. I didn’t like that it ended at all.” -VOGUE
“Dinan portrays her characters with astonishing depth and nuance as they try to understand the complexity and fragility of others.” -PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, STARRED REVIEW
