Tag: best woman

Best Woman is a romcom about a trans woman attending her brother’s wedding who discovers that her high school crush is the maid of honour. Julia’s family is supportive of her, unlike many of her friends’ families, so she’s happy to be best woman at her brother’s wedding even with having to interact with so many of her extended family members, but she’s even more excited when she discovers that her high school crush, Kim, is the maid of honour. When they meet up, Kim assumes that Julia’s family are less than happy about Julia being trans, and Julia uses this lie to try and win over Kim via sympathy. As the wedding draws closer, however, Julia realises that she can’t keep up the lie forever, and being a romcom heroine doesn’t always pay off.

I was excited to read Best Woman as you don’t see that many trans romcoms, and I love to see what we are writing in every genre. The book follows a lot of classic romcom conventions, particularly around the fact that the protagonist lies to her love interest in the hope of fuelling their romance, and it’s good to explore what a trans version of that might be: in this case, using the idea of transphobia to garner sympathy. Whilst the romance side of things is important to the plot, the book really focuses on family, and the types of family support you can have, with people who are and aren’t actually related to you. Julia has to deal with how family members perceive her and the difficulty as a trans person of navigating relatives remembering you as a child, not always as you’d like to be perceived (definitely something relatable for me).

The comedy side of the romcom is snarky, with a lot of jokes about queer life, and I particularly liked Julia’s fittingly chaotic romcom friends, who in this case are a group of queer friends from New York City who do things like “borrow” clothes from pop stars. Oddly, the main thing that didn’t get any snark was a few references (from Julia’s POV as she’s the narrator) to Harry Potter, and given that there’s a comment about Silence of the Lambs and whether it is okay to like it, it felt disorienting that the Harry Potter references were neutral and didn’t at least get a bit of commentary about how Julia couldn’t help seeing the comparisons or memories even considering the author.

The story itself is simple, building up to the wedding with plenty of drama going down, but there’s lots of little moments exploring the complexities of Julia’s emotions around her family and what she wants in life in general (even the main bad thing she does, lying to Kim, is explored in its complexities, though the book never lets Julia get away with it as just being due to the pressures she feels). The ending has more of a focus on family, and without wanting to give any spoilers, there’s a fairly ambiguous epilogue that personally I felt the book could’ve done without, but I understand that some people are looking for that kind of epilogue in a romance book.

I’ve struggled to find romcoms with trans characters written by trans people previously, and Best Woman really hits that spot. It allows Julia to be a classic romcom protagonist making mistakes that outside of the genre you might think are a bit much, but in a romcom are just the kinds of drama you get, whilst also being a snarky look at what it is like to be around different family members both when trans and as a child of divorced parents. The cover I saw before reading had a quote from Torrey Peters, and the book does make me think of things she’s said about trans people writing in all genres, and how Detransition, Baby was a take on a comedy of manners with a trans lens, because Best Woman feels like it is not just a romcom with a trans protagonist, but also considering what kind of space that might be and how transness might fit into the “wedding romcom” genre.