Even if all is full of love, as Björk decreed on her 1997 song, it can still be notoriously hard to pin down. In her clear-eyed and sophisticated second book, Love In Exile, the British journalist Shon Faye mines from her own life and the past to interrogate why we’re denied, or we deny, love.
Shon Faye is part Carrie Bradshaw, part Dolly Alderton, part Fleabag. “In calling myself a failure in love,” she writes in the first few pages, “I’m just asserting cold, hard facts.” Her observations sting, and she’s never one to take herself out of the joke — it’s how you learn, after all. She takes her fears and regrets, bad breakups, and her experience as a trans woman in an increasingly hostile environment, and turns them not only into material for a book, but a guiding force as to how to live.
Even though “everyone craves an uplifting takeaway message”, she writes in the last chapter, she refuses it. Shon Faye’s version of love is messy and multi-faceted: chapters range from motherhood to religion to alcoholism. Even when it’s not necessarily relatable (she was infatuated with Catholicism in her teen years), she identifies several touchpoints of the modern era.
Inundated by the onslaught of capitalist-mediated messaging, the promise of a book about love itself can seem like a farce. “I still cringe at the idea that loving myself may one day involve saying affirmations in the mirror,” she writes. “‘Love yourself’ can often sound like just another consumer imperative: lighting a luxury scented candle or taking a course in tantric masturbation.”
Only rarely, and usually towards the end of a chapter, does Shon Faye dip into the esoteric, lyrical type of writing so endemic in helpful yet softer books with sentences that beg to be underlined. This is how she ends a chapter on intimacy: “[Sex] is about the excitement that comes with dissolving separateness. It is about knowledge and seeking. It is a profane communion with a specific person in a peculiar, inimitable, intimate way, a way in which you will never meet most other human beings: the flicker of an eyelid in ecstasy, the unguarded vernacular of nudity, the shadows on the wall and the taste of salt on strange skin.”
It’s sort of a shame she feels she has to manipulate her style, as her words are strong enough without this veneer. In the next chapter, she calls out, “How truly lucky I feel to be sterilized and childless!” I know which I find more appealing.
However, Shon Faye is always one to reel herself back. After she suggests the “revolutionary power” love can aid in grassroots movements, she adds: “To speak of a ‘politics of love’ risks descending into the new-agey and saccharine, the kind of gibberish you might hear from unkempt trust funders disembarking from their planet-choking private flight back from a bougie ayahuasca retreat.” Thankfully, Faye is a writer who can hear herself, allowing some nuance in.
Shon Faye is an expert at knowing how and where things will land. A lyrical, hearty passage will end in a hard truth or a sex joke; it’s quite refreshing when a political writer doesn’t take themselves too seriously. You can even sense that she still rolls her eyes at the idea of having to write a love-centric tell-all in the first place. “I’m not convinced you can learn to be loved or practice love well merely from reading a book,” she says in its final moments, which would erode everything before it had Love In Exile not embraced ambiguity at every turn.
Gender roles have not served society well, of course, but Shon Faye often wonders if happiness comes from marrying a protective man (“Possibly in a church”). She’d like to be sexy, as many women would, but doing so would play into a male fantasy, weaned on porn. She often uses men for sex, denying their personhood (“Given that men could not be trusted, I did not have the power to respect their inner lives and was best off using sex to manipulate them”).
When they do the same, and she stays with them, it stings: “More painful than the memory of any man’s disregard for my humanity is my betrayal of myself in letting him do it for something as supposedly cheap and as fleeting as the feeling of being desired.”
Contradicting yourself isn’t a flaw; rather, it’s just part of being human. Less honest writers would certainly make their books more ideologically homogeneous than Love In Exile. Faye is more interested in the meaty truth.
Nowhere does the book feel that Shon Faye has figured it out, that she’s a PhD in Love Studies. If she had, well, that’d be the biggest marker of ineptitude — she’s the first to lay bare her mistakes and fuck-ups. Love In Exile’s thesis is that love is a squirmy thing to figure out; it is, in turn, fragile, hard to come by, or the easiest thing ever. What else is there to do? “Love is a risky business, and it hurts,” Faye writes. “I want to bear witness to that and still try anyway.”
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