Bad Habit [Audiobook]

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Combining the raw realism and vulnerability of Shuggie Bain and Detransition, Baby with the poignant sensibility of Pedro Almodvar, this is a staggering coming-of-age novel deeply rooted in the struggles of a trans woman growing up in Madrid.

Anchored by the voice of its sweet and defiant protagonist, Bad Habit casts a trans woman's trying youth as a heartfelt odyssey. Raised in an animated yet impoverished blue-collar neighborhood, the protagonist struggles to find her place. As the city around her changes--the heroin epidemic that ravages Madrid through the '80s and '90s, rallying calls of worker solidarity, and the pulsing beat of the city's night scene--she becomes increasingly detached from the world and, most crucially, from herself.

Yet through her eyes, the streets and people of Madrid are illuminated by a poetry absent from everyday life. And by this guiding light she begins to plot her own course, from Margarita, the local trans woman whose unspoken kinship both captivates and frightens her, to Jay, her first love and source of an inevitable heartbreak, to the irrepressible diva Caramel.

As she forges ahead, she sets her compass to a personal north star: endeavoring to find herself. But with each step forward, she is confronted by a violence she doesn't yet know how to counter. In this exciting, often terrifying, world each choice is truly a matter of life and death.

With her first novel, Alana S. Portero strikingly underscores the ties between gender and class, the search for identity, and the power of sisterhood and community. Gentle but blistering, Bad Habit is a mesmerizing story of self-realization that speaks to the outsider in all of us.

"I urge you, read Alana S. Portero's Bad Habit to fully grasp the degree of adversity, pain, and danger endured by those growing up trans." -Pedro Almodvar

Reviews

"A novel that intertwines LGTBIQ+ activism with humor, beauty with pain, the dissociation of the interior with exterior world...The most talked-about debut of the year."

Author Bio

Alana S. Portero is a Medieval historian, writer, playwright, LGTB activist, and co-founder of the theater company Striga. Her writings on feminism and LGTBQ activism from the perspective of a trans woman have been featured in a number of international publications, including Agente provocador, Eldiario.es, El Salto Diario, SModa, and Vogue. Mara Faye Lethem is a Brooklyn-born, Barcelona-based writer and literary translator from Catalan and Spanish. Her translations have appeared in The Best American Non-Required Reading 2010, Granta, the Paris Review, and McSweeney's.