Shon Faye: ‘I'll Never Write a Memoir Again’
The celebrated British author on why her new work of non-fiction, ‘Love in Exile’, is her most revealing book yet
The celebrated British author on why her new work of non-fiction, ‘Love in Exile’, is her most revealing book yet

Shon Faye is one of the most celebrated non-fiction authors in the UK, rising to fame for her discerning prose on culture, relationships and class. Her first book, The Transgender Issue (2021), a provocative treatise on gender identity debates in the UK, was part of her rise to fame. Not only did Faye offer a detailed survey of queer history, but she also indicated why trans-liberation is connected to liberation for all. Her new book of essays, Love in Exile (2025), explores the existential and social challenges of courtship and heartache. Rather than focus solely on the discrimination that many transgender people face, however, the text is a literary memoir that interrogates how ancient and present-day writers conceptualize and dissect love. As a Vogue contributor with her advice column ‘Dear Shon’ (2022–ongoing), host of the podcast Call Me Mother (2021–ongoing) and author of Dazed and Confused Magazine’s ‘Future of Sex’ series (2022–ongoing), she addresses the topic of romance with honesty and poise. Here, Faye discusses her literary and cultural inspirations.
Edna Bonhomme In Love in Exile, you explore heartbreak through a wide range of references, from classical works, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses [8 CE], to pop music, like Lana Del Rey’s album Norman Fucking Rockwell! [2019]. How does reading and interpreting across different media help you make sense of the world in which you live?
Shon Faye As a reader, I’m a magpie because I have quite an associative brain. I can read disparate things and be interested in looking at the connections between them. Whether reading fiction or nonfiction, I’m focusing on the resonances with what I’ve read elsewhere. For me, being a reader is deeply connected to being a writer. When you look at a text like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, it gives you a deep comfort to know that some of the most profound human experiences have been wrestled with and chewed over for thousands of years. My engagement with culture, first and foremost, is about feeling less alone and finding recognition, which is deeply connected to the kind of young person I was, as well as about reflecting on the world around me. As a younger person, reading became more than escapism, which implies that it’s pure fantasy; it became a way to understand myself better.
EB You cite bell hooks’s All About Love [1999] alongside the writings of several other feminists. How did you choose to reference these scholars, writers and thinkers who, like hooks, aim to challenge traditional notions of love?
SF While writing a book about love, I realized an author doesn’t normally write about something unless it’s a preoccupation. Right up until her death, hooks was celibate for a very long time – about 17 years. And there are many interviews where she says she wanted a romantic partner. It seems like All About Love was a way for her, as an intellectual, to wrestle with her personal development. That is partly why, in Love in Exile, I review much more of my personal life; it’s part memoir. My book breaks down even further the distinction between myself as a thinker and myself as a doer or a person who leads a messy life.
EB But who isn’t messy?
SF Absolutely. In the chapter ‘System Failure’, I discuss our current cultural obsession with consulting experts who can ‘teach’ us how to love ‘appropriately’. I use hooks as an example; however, as I demonstrate, love expertise is prevalent everywhere. Whether talking about [Belgian psychotherapist and writer] Esther Perel or attachment theorists, we feel compelled to surrender ourselves to experts to find direction. There’s pervasive anxiety about how we manage our own love lives. I wanted to engage with intellectuals surrounding love and, perhaps, challenge the concept of authority in this realm, including my own. Overall, I strive to provide strong intellectual feminist socialist arguments. Still, I also recount the unhinged romance I experienced with someone I knew for only about six weeks – who was five years younger than me and who I drank excessively with.
EB Do you see a direct connection between your role as a writer composing essays on love and relationships and the structure of your book?
SF For me, as an essayist or memoirist, there is a long period of reflection. I experimented with these ideas for quite a while. Now that I write an advice column for Vogue, I have a special inbox full of people contacting me about their love problems and I notice patterns. What is it that people are mostly searching for? What topics do people want answers to, particularly in relation to love? I spent about two and a half years writing Love in Exile so, by the time it was finished, I had developed some very different ideas around these topics. Partly because, as we age, our relationships change.
EB In your previous book, The Transgender Issue, you pointed out how trans people are often forced to become experts in all trans subjects. How do you balance the conundrum of writing on the topic of love without it being truncated to this one part of your identity?
SF Trans women’s love lives are so invisible in mass culture that I have no choice but to talk about myself, and I’ve become more comfortable with that. As writers from minorities, we have the opportunity to do precisely what Toni Morrison says, which is to see if you can make yourself the centre and pull other people towards you. I’ve found that it’s possible to do this to quite a surprising degree.
EB Throughout the book, you discuss the challenges of finding, expressing and receiving love, particularly in the context of growing economic insecurity under austerity. Do we need to develop utopias distinct from capitalism to nurture loving and enduring relationships?
SF I have read the whole spectrum of radical feminist writing, including the second wave: books by lesbian separatists who formed women-only communes and wrote about family abolition. If anything, we see the opportunities for love outside traditional family structures depleting, not expanding. Historically, marriage served a community function, as imperfect in patriarchy as it was. It says that community is found in couples rather than in broader groups of support, such as friendships. That’s no longer true in the UK, where I live.
I also think we should address the problem of the disappearance of spiritual life. And, by that, I don’t mean religion; I mean a sense of community service to one another, of something beyond consumerism in this materialistic world. Some of the questions that arise in Love in Exile are: How do we stop the atomisation process in Western society? How do we reverse a cultural addiction to technology, to more and more solitary time?
EB How will you ensure that you can hold on to the myriad themes and issues you are exploring in Love in Exile as you navigate the press tour?
SF I think one of the enormous benefits of being a writer as opposed to an actor, standup comic or singer is that the book becomes a separate entity from me once I’ve delivered it.
EB Certainly. And given that privacy can be a form of currency, do you think you will ever write another memoir?
SF I will never write a memoir again. I enjoyed the experience, but it’s not one I will be repeating.
Shon Faye, Love in Exile, will be published by Allen Lane on 6 February