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OKPsyche
An unnamed trans woman is looking for a sense of belonging, a better relationship with her son, and friends that aren’t imaginary in this playful and aching short novel. As she navigates the many worlds she belongs to she wrestles with her many anxieties and fears about the world around her. Her son and ex live in another state. Companion robots are popping up. Environmental disasters are being outsourced from the coast to the Midwest. And at any time anyone anywhere might turn out to be a new friend or an enemy.
In this stunning compact novel, DeNiro confidently wends her way through the real and imagined worries and fears of adulthood, parenthood, and selfhood in the contemporary world.
In this stunning compact novel, DeNiro confidently wends her way through the real and imagined worries and fears of adulthood, parenthood, and selfhood in the contemporary world.
200 pages, Paperback
First published September 12, 2023
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2012 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 62 reviews
January 30, 2025
WOW!!!!!!!!! my gender hurts. i haven't felt like this since i read my first maggie nelson book
June 1, 2023
OKPsyche seems bound to be a classic of our time, like Sexting the Cherry, to be read and considered with great care the different meanings layered into each passage. As a non-gender person, I enjoyed it greatly, and getting to see the side of a transgender woman. Highly recommended, no matter what gender you happen to be.
December 12, 2023
Wow like wow. Really fantastic and usually I kind of slog through speculative fiction stuff even when it’s short like this, but I totally just tore through it and the writing is amazing which I never feel like I can say because I don’t think I’m good at detecting the goodness of writing but I know this is totally brill 😟🤗 do read
May 30, 2023
strange and very enjoyable. some passages really moved me and i will be reading them dozens of more times.
January 31, 2024
Beautiful prose and there were moments I really loved. For instance: "The aftermath was much easier, though the hard work became of a much different sort. It was the hard work of allowing yourself to be maudlin and ridiculous, to sow the ground of your past with a viaduct of tears. It was the hard work of being embarrassing. This was the pact with your body, your skin and hips accelerating into a more agreeable form. Your body wasn't a myth." and "How does love fulfill a desire? You have to figure this our on your own. But you wonder if love is not meant to--instead it is meant to make all desires sharper, more real. " Brilliant. Brilliant.
The book itself took a while to get going and I didn't feel the whole "speculative fiction" aspect was fully fleshed out. There were moments of weirdness but I almost wanted it to go further.
I didn't love that it's written in second person. It made it feel like the book is trying to be the voice of THE universal trans experience. But that was my main issue.
There were a few typos in my edition which aren't a huge deal but did take me out of the world for a minute or so each time.
The book itself took a while to get going and I didn't feel the whole "speculative fiction" aspect was fully fleshed out. There were moments of weirdness but I almost wanted it to go further.
I didn't love that it's written in second person. It made it feel like the book is trying to be the voice of THE universal trans experience. But that was my main issue.
There were a few typos in my edition which aren't a huge deal but did take me out of the world for a minute or so each time.
April 3, 2025
I loved this - DeNiro has crafted a tender, deceptively simple novel/la of transfeminine interiority. On a structural level, we tread on familiar ground: a lapsed writer reflects on failure, loneliness, love, loss. Yet the temporal texture -- which is addressed head-on near the beginning of the book -- is a notably trans one, with the narrator, in her forties, exploring in-depth the ways that she is simultaneously aging backwards, toward a late-gotten trans "youth," while also aging forward, through a divorce, a growing child, and the illness and death of her mother. These everyday events are wrapped in a metatext of transmisogyny, a cloud DeNiro/the narrator address effectively via mythic tropes, leaving readers, by the end, in a state of deep and reflective melancholy.
April 24, 2024
This is a weird but brilliant little read that touches on the many issues (and joys) that come alongside being trans. Community, affordable healthcare, passing, transphobes, fetishising, loneliness, validation, living authentically. And it did it all in such a unique way that slightly confused me and maybe some of it went over my head but it was so so enjoyable in its tenderness and rawness.
September 12, 2023
can’t wait for u to read this one Meghan
November 26, 2023
I didn’t really like this. Why so depressing about ones transness??
December 12, 2024
OKPsyche, a play on words of OKCupid, is a seemingly autofictional meander in the life of an unnamed woman who transitions in her 40s. She’s several years into her transition but not totally settled into her new life. Her wife and young son left her to live in another state, and she is trying to make sense of her role in her child’s life, especially at a distance. Is she his mother? Will he ever see her as a Mother? Does she feel like his mother? Much of the book is preoccupied with her dating life as someone who was formerly a straight man and now dates only men or other trans women. She dates a possessive abusive person named Aveline and a friendly woman named Hannah who is part of an extended polycule and has no time for her. The perils of the queer dating scene esp when middle aged etc.
The book is set in Minneapolis but with a slightly dystopian bent. I imagine much of it was written during 2020, because it has an empty lonely feel just like lockdown felt, and offhand mentions of soldiers and camps were not so strange if you lived in the Twin Cities during 2020 and its aftermath. At one point our narrator goes to an underground guerilla self-care network operated out of a work camp located on the shores of Lake Minnetonka. The people in the camp work in the gated communities in Minnetonka and hail from Little Little Mogadishu and Little Powderhorn. I wonder what happened in Powderhorn to displace this many people. The person she’s going to meet in the camp is named Emoji and they provide “Electrolysis for Trauma”, but our narrator is reluctant to use it because she doesn’t think anything bad-enough has happened to her. “Most of our work is for others who happen to be in more dire straits than you are. But that doesn’t mean you, and others losing home while caught in the skein of late American capitalism, don’t deserve help as well. Just…a little less than the trans women who are getting their throats slit.”
A running theme throughout this book is being acutely aware that as a white person who is employed and housed she has a lot of material privileges. She’s not wealthy by any means, but it seems that in the world of the book the political and economic situation is even more dire than it is currently, so having these basic necessities is noteworthy. She has never been beaten for being trans, never been kicked out of her home, she knows trans women have died because of being trans. At the same time, she is constantly worried whenever she’s in public that people are staring at her and/or wishing harm upon her, and this hypervigilance takes a toll. “You forget that you are lucky too, privileged at birth. You try to remind yourself of this; you are not without a home or food or unbruised skin. And though the terror of assault is almost ever-present, it usually metastasizes into ridicule or contempt– snickers or deep evil glares”.
She’s at such a distance to everything and everyone around her. Her wife and child live in Kansas and she hasn’t seen her 11 year old son in over a year. ORIOLE sends her two devices to stave off her loneliness. A Camera Obscura with which she can glimpse her son, and an automaton boyfriend which she has yet to activate. She sees her son through the obscura or through FaceTime, where she has painfully stilted conversations with him. 11 is an age where kids start pulling away and going into their own world, but it’s even more difficult when you don’t see your parent often and have to make small talk. ____ really wants a relationship with her son but isn’t sure what it will look like. In her early days of transition her son was hostile and said many cruel things, but he was also a child going through a major life change. She wonders if she’ll ever be recognized as his Mother, by her son or her ex-wife or her own mother or the world at large, and she isn’t even sure how she feels about it herself.
She’s always comparing herself to other trans women. She feels frustrated with 22 year olds who think it’s too late for them to transition. Honestly it seems extremely difficult to transition so late in life, because not only do you have an established life you have to leave in a sense, (you don’t always have to, but many marriages and families cannot survive such a big change, plus you simply have more established patterns in life and have to completely change the way you move through and interact with the world). Also, the trans community skews young and it must be more difficult to fit into the social scene. ____ goes to support social groups and finds herself comparing where in their transition journey she is, and finds it easy to slip into envy when she perceives others as having an easier time than her. She is surprised when she hangs out with a friend that she considers to be uber confident and the friend says “I’ve always looked up to you”. It’s always jarring to realize people might want what you have. “Understanding other trans women’s interiority was surprisingly difficult. You expected better of yourself”.
The title is a play on OKCupid, except it’s OKPsyche. In the middle of the book there is a section that has the entirety of John Keats’ Ode to Psyche and in between each stanza is a vignette of what it’s like to be on dating apps as a trans woman. In the first two stanzas where the narrator of the poem spies Psyche and Cupid intertwined in a forest ____ is swiping through endless photos of men with Fish, men with their frat bros, men with All Lives Matter in bio. After the Stanza where the narrator of the poem laments that Psyche never got as much attention as other gods, _____ recounts several dates that went poorly– she gets ghosted, men turn around upon realizing she’s trans, TWICE a guy backs out because he just got a tattoo and needs to lay down. In the final stanza the narrator vows to make a shrine for Psyche in his mind, and there’s no tinder section after.
Initially I struggled to figure out how Psyche related to anything in this story. Tbh I didn’t know this story before reading this. Psyche was the most beautiful woman anyone had ever seen, and she and Cupid got together. Cupid was the child of Venus/Aphrodite, who was always considered the most beautiful, and as a Boymom she got jealous of Psyche and banished her to do a series of tasks. Cupid still got with her, but she wasn’t allowed to look at him or know who he was, but of course she did anyway. ____ sees herself as Psyche in this situation. Venus is cis, which harks to cis women being resentful of trans women for performing femininity better than they can. But I think the main application of Psyche to ____’s story is the structure of the Ode to Psyche. In the Ode the first stanzas start with observation from a distance. Throughout the book ____ is constantly thinking about how she is perceived in public, both for safety but also in a desire for recognition. Recognition is a double edged sword for her. Transitioning socially and medically is risking ridicule, shame and even death to externalize her insides. The alternative of remaining a ball of shame inside her own mind is worse. Recognition is something everyone on earth desires, and when there’s incongruence between how you’re recognized and how you wish to be recognized can be destabilizing or debilitating. However you can’t control how other people see you, and you can’t truly know how other people see you either. When she was living as a man she often felt invisible, and enjoyed feeling invisible especially when women forgot she was there and acted like one of the girls. Now that she’s trans she’s hypervisible, and she both wants to be seen but also wants to blend in. She wants to be recognized by a lover but lives in fear of being clocked by a hostile stranger, and sometimes especially when perusing tinder it becomes clear the potential lovers and potential violent strangers are the same individuals. In the middle stanza the narrator of the Keats poem laments that Psyche never got as much hype as other goddesses; there aren’t shrines and statues to her compared to the better known gods. Similarly, many of the men ____ meets on the apps are happy to have sex with her discreetly, or are interested in her before they realize she’s trans, but they are unwilling to openly love a trans woman. In the end of the poem the narrator turns inward and vows to build a shrine for Psyche in his mind. OKPsyche is entirely written in 2nd person, so maybe it’s ____ who will build the mental shrine for herself.
_____ is somewhat embarrassed to care so much about wanting a boyfriend when it is small potatoes compared to global warming and war and all that. Her loneliness is partially for the normal reasons a person is lonely– we all want love and connection and recognition– but also for an imagined sense of security. She hopes that with a boyfriend she won’t be as afraid when she’s walking down the street. ____ gets an automaton boyfriend in the mail, sent by an anonymous benefactor called ORIOLE. She avoids assembling him. In the penultimate scene, she throws his still-unassembled body parts into a giant chasm and goes to embrace her son. “And in this alleged ending, when [Psyche] turns over in bed and sees Cupid there, arm draped over her, she thinks what would have happened if there was not a man to save her, and how she might have saved herself. 138. The automaton bf might make her feel protected against the wider world, but since he’s not real he can’t see her and you can’t be truly loved without being truly seen. It’s not completely an “omg I love myself now and I’ll never care what strangers or potential lovers think of me again” ending, but perhaps a shift in priority or understanding.
This interior/exterior stuff is the crux of the book right down to the Clarice Lispector epigraph “and it’s inside myself that I must create someone who will understand”. Even though there are plenty of scenes where she spends time with friends (some of whom are revealed to be imaginary), I found this book incredibly lonely. The second-person narration makes me feel like she’s an automaton being commanded, but it was an interesting choice that it’s an outside voice talking to her as she explores her interiority and contemplates how she is perceived from the outside. I read it at a good time of year, cold grey winter in Minneapolis. Reading things set in your hometown is always fun because you recognize all the little mentions of places like Edina and Roseville and Eden Prairie. There were several corny moments (the self-care brigade etc) and the word “inexorably” was used about 5 times, and I wasn’t completely sold on the Psyche metaphor. Still, transitioning is the perfect ontological position from which to explore recognition and interiority and I enjoyed hanging out in (or just outside of) ____’s head.
The book is set in Minneapolis but with a slightly dystopian bent. I imagine much of it was written during 2020, because it has an empty lonely feel just like lockdown felt, and offhand mentions of soldiers and camps were not so strange if you lived in the Twin Cities during 2020 and its aftermath. At one point our narrator goes to an underground guerilla self-care network operated out of a work camp located on the shores of Lake Minnetonka. The people in the camp work in the gated communities in Minnetonka and hail from Little Little Mogadishu and Little Powderhorn. I wonder what happened in Powderhorn to displace this many people. The person she’s going to meet in the camp is named Emoji and they provide “Electrolysis for Trauma”, but our narrator is reluctant to use it because she doesn’t think anything bad-enough has happened to her. “Most of our work is for others who happen to be in more dire straits than you are. But that doesn’t mean you, and others losing home while caught in the skein of late American capitalism, don’t deserve help as well. Just…a little less than the trans women who are getting their throats slit.”
A running theme throughout this book is being acutely aware that as a white person who is employed and housed she has a lot of material privileges. She’s not wealthy by any means, but it seems that in the world of the book the political and economic situation is even more dire than it is currently, so having these basic necessities is noteworthy. She has never been beaten for being trans, never been kicked out of her home, she knows trans women have died because of being trans. At the same time, she is constantly worried whenever she’s in public that people are staring at her and/or wishing harm upon her, and this hypervigilance takes a toll. “You forget that you are lucky too, privileged at birth. You try to remind yourself of this; you are not without a home or food or unbruised skin. And though the terror of assault is almost ever-present, it usually metastasizes into ridicule or contempt– snickers or deep evil glares”.
She’s at such a distance to everything and everyone around her. Her wife and child live in Kansas and she hasn’t seen her 11 year old son in over a year. ORIOLE sends her two devices to stave off her loneliness. A Camera Obscura with which she can glimpse her son, and an automaton boyfriend which she has yet to activate. She sees her son through the obscura or through FaceTime, where she has painfully stilted conversations with him. 11 is an age where kids start pulling away and going into their own world, but it’s even more difficult when you don’t see your parent often and have to make small talk. ____ really wants a relationship with her son but isn’t sure what it will look like. In her early days of transition her son was hostile and said many cruel things, but he was also a child going through a major life change. She wonders if she’ll ever be recognized as his Mother, by her son or her ex-wife or her own mother or the world at large, and she isn’t even sure how she feels about it herself.
She’s always comparing herself to other trans women. She feels frustrated with 22 year olds who think it’s too late for them to transition. Honestly it seems extremely difficult to transition so late in life, because not only do you have an established life you have to leave in a sense, (you don’t always have to, but many marriages and families cannot survive such a big change, plus you simply have more established patterns in life and have to completely change the way you move through and interact with the world). Also, the trans community skews young and it must be more difficult to fit into the social scene. ____ goes to support social groups and finds herself comparing where in their transition journey she is, and finds it easy to slip into envy when she perceives others as having an easier time than her. She is surprised when she hangs out with a friend that she considers to be uber confident and the friend says “I’ve always looked up to you”. It’s always jarring to realize people might want what you have. “Understanding other trans women’s interiority was surprisingly difficult. You expected better of yourself”.
The title is a play on OKCupid, except it’s OKPsyche. In the middle of the book there is a section that has the entirety of John Keats’ Ode to Psyche and in between each stanza is a vignette of what it’s like to be on dating apps as a trans woman. In the first two stanzas where the narrator of the poem spies Psyche and Cupid intertwined in a forest ____ is swiping through endless photos of men with Fish, men with their frat bros, men with All Lives Matter in bio. After the Stanza where the narrator of the poem laments that Psyche never got as much attention as other gods, _____ recounts several dates that went poorly– she gets ghosted, men turn around upon realizing she’s trans, TWICE a guy backs out because he just got a tattoo and needs to lay down. In the final stanza the narrator vows to make a shrine for Psyche in his mind, and there’s no tinder section after.
Initially I struggled to figure out how Psyche related to anything in this story. Tbh I didn’t know this story before reading this. Psyche was the most beautiful woman anyone had ever seen, and she and Cupid got together. Cupid was the child of Venus/Aphrodite, who was always considered the most beautiful, and as a Boymom she got jealous of Psyche and banished her to do a series of tasks. Cupid still got with her, but she wasn’t allowed to look at him or know who he was, but of course she did anyway. ____ sees herself as Psyche in this situation. Venus is cis, which harks to cis women being resentful of trans women for performing femininity better than they can. But I think the main application of Psyche to ____’s story is the structure of the Ode to Psyche. In the Ode the first stanzas start with observation from a distance. Throughout the book ____ is constantly thinking about how she is perceived in public, both for safety but also in a desire for recognition. Recognition is a double edged sword for her. Transitioning socially and medically is risking ridicule, shame and even death to externalize her insides. The alternative of remaining a ball of shame inside her own mind is worse. Recognition is something everyone on earth desires, and when there’s incongruence between how you’re recognized and how you wish to be recognized can be destabilizing or debilitating. However you can’t control how other people see you, and you can’t truly know how other people see you either. When she was living as a man she often felt invisible, and enjoyed feeling invisible especially when women forgot she was there and acted like one of the girls. Now that she’s trans she’s hypervisible, and she both wants to be seen but also wants to blend in. She wants to be recognized by a lover but lives in fear of being clocked by a hostile stranger, and sometimes especially when perusing tinder it becomes clear the potential lovers and potential violent strangers are the same individuals. In the middle stanza the narrator of the Keats poem laments that Psyche never got as much hype as other goddesses; there aren’t shrines and statues to her compared to the better known gods. Similarly, many of the men ____ meets on the apps are happy to have sex with her discreetly, or are interested in her before they realize she’s trans, but they are unwilling to openly love a trans woman. In the end of the poem the narrator turns inward and vows to build a shrine for Psyche in his mind. OKPsyche is entirely written in 2nd person, so maybe it’s ____ who will build the mental shrine for herself.
_____ is somewhat embarrassed to care so much about wanting a boyfriend when it is small potatoes compared to global warming and war and all that. Her loneliness is partially for the normal reasons a person is lonely– we all want love and connection and recognition– but also for an imagined sense of security. She hopes that with a boyfriend she won’t be as afraid when she’s walking down the street. ____ gets an automaton boyfriend in the mail, sent by an anonymous benefactor called ORIOLE. She avoids assembling him. In the penultimate scene, she throws his still-unassembled body parts into a giant chasm and goes to embrace her son. “And in this alleged ending, when [Psyche] turns over in bed and sees Cupid there, arm draped over her, she thinks what would have happened if there was not a man to save her, and how she might have saved herself. 138. The automaton bf might make her feel protected against the wider world, but since he’s not real he can’t see her and you can’t be truly loved without being truly seen. It’s not completely an “omg I love myself now and I’ll never care what strangers or potential lovers think of me again” ending, but perhaps a shift in priority or understanding.
This interior/exterior stuff is the crux of the book right down to the Clarice Lispector epigraph “and it’s inside myself that I must create someone who will understand”. Even though there are plenty of scenes where she spends time with friends (some of whom are revealed to be imaginary), I found this book incredibly lonely. The second-person narration makes me feel like she’s an automaton being commanded, but it was an interesting choice that it’s an outside voice talking to her as she explores her interiority and contemplates how she is perceived from the outside. I read it at a good time of year, cold grey winter in Minneapolis. Reading things set in your hometown is always fun because you recognize all the little mentions of places like Edina and Roseville and Eden Prairie. There were several corny moments (the self-care brigade etc) and the word “inexorably” was used about 5 times, and I wasn’t completely sold on the Psyche metaphor. Still, transitioning is the perfect ontological position from which to explore recognition and interiority and I enjoyed hanging out in (or just outside of) ____’s head.
June 12, 2023
We are each a body, in a larger system of communities and families and contracts. But we are also the even more complex and confusing environments of our own minds - layered matrices of memories, emotions, constructed identities, and true selves. OKPsyche follows an unnamed transitioning woman in a small, unnamed Midwest American city as she continues to learn who she is, struggling to unwrite the trauma of her closeted past while finding her place in an uncertain present. There are moments of concrete reality in DeNiro's story - an estranged son and ex-wife, a sick mother, an aggressively staring stranger. However, her real skill is puling us deep into our narrators' interior life. A life where memories overlay themselves onto the waking world. Where self-care can include a trip into a very near and very possible dystopian future that accents the challenges of our dystopian present. Friends who exist, and friends who exist only in her mind.
With moments of magical realism, expressionistic self-imaginings, and a narrator more unreliable to herself than to the reader, DeNiro has created a deeply affecting and readable short novel. Her narrators angst feels real, as do her moments of clarity and her path forward to love (inward and outward). I really loved it too.
With moments of magical realism, expressionistic self-imaginings, and a narrator more unreliable to herself than to the reader, DeNiro has created a deeply affecting and readable short novel. Her narrators angst feels real, as do her moments of clarity and her path forward to love (inward and outward). I really loved it too.
July 27, 2024
i’m having a hard time knowing what to rate this. i’d say it’s more of a 2.5 stars than a 2, but even still any form of a 2 feels too low & any form of a 3 feels too high.
i’m grateful to have read a book that comes from a perspective & life experience so different from my own. simultaneously, this book was incredibly heavy for me to read. i had to take breaks from it & it was difficult for me to stay engaged throughout most of it. some parts of the book were very confusing for me & i had to re-read certain paragraphs over & over. sometimes i still didn’t quite catch what was happening, so i decided i would stop trying so hard to understand & just engage with the book primarily from a place of feeling.
my favorite part was the interaction with the man on the airplane. his little monologue about people was intriguing to me & made me think. from then on, i actually felt very engaged with the book, but that was only maybe 10-15 pages.
i noticed a few mistakes grammar wise in this book which bugged me a little bit, but it wasn’t so often that i felt completely distracted. it just seemed like parts of the book were glossed over.
i think it’s beautiful & important to engage with the pain of others experiencing our world so differently, so i’m thankful for the perspective i received in the end.
i’m grateful to have read a book that comes from a perspective & life experience so different from my own. simultaneously, this book was incredibly heavy for me to read. i had to take breaks from it & it was difficult for me to stay engaged throughout most of it. some parts of the book were very confusing for me & i had to re-read certain paragraphs over & over. sometimes i still didn’t quite catch what was happening, so i decided i would stop trying so hard to understand & just engage with the book primarily from a place of feeling.
my favorite part was the interaction with the man on the airplane. his little monologue about people was intriguing to me & made me think. from then on, i actually felt very engaged with the book, but that was only maybe 10-15 pages.
i noticed a few mistakes grammar wise in this book which bugged me a little bit, but it wasn’t so often that i felt completely distracted. it just seemed like parts of the book were glossed over.
i think it’s beautiful & important to engage with the pain of others experiencing our world so differently, so i’m thankful for the perspective i received in the end.
June 8, 2025
Recommended by Laura (openbookopen on Instagram).
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A lovely, sometimes intensely sad, sometimes scary, and sometimes hopeful story. Reads like a fictional memoir of a particular moment in a transwoman’s life—but mingled into the fear and the reflections of regret (dissolution of marriage, removal of child, etc)—are little moments of magical realism (daydream? hallucination? stories to explain inner pain?).
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Second person POV is very hard to consistently pull off—but here it’s done so effectively and it makes you the reader become the main character, living in their thoughts.
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A fast, satisfying, emotionally turbulent read. I liked it a lot.
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A lovely, sometimes intensely sad, sometimes scary, and sometimes hopeful story. Reads like a fictional memoir of a particular moment in a transwoman’s life—but mingled into the fear and the reflections of regret (dissolution of marriage, removal of child, etc)—are little moments of magical realism (daydream? hallucination? stories to explain inner pain?).
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Second person POV is very hard to consistently pull off—but here it’s done so effectively and it makes you the reader become the main character, living in their thoughts.
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A fast, satisfying, emotionally turbulent read. I liked it a lot.
December 2, 2023
Gorgeous, raw, sharp, and tender, all at once, this book made me cry several times while I read it. Told with piercing emotional power fused with a surreal dream-logic all its own, reading this book felt like reading someone's heart.
February 4, 2024
(3.5 stars/rounding up)
If you need a mythology refresher (which I did, before I started reading this): per Apuleius's Metamorphoses, Psyche was a) the goddess of the soul, b) Cupid's wife and c) a great beauty who was transformed from being a mortal woman to being immortal after a series of trials. This all seems relevant to consider when thinking about the main character of this short novel, who's an unnamed trans woman in Minnesota who is figuring things out as best she can. She misses her son, who lives with her ex-wife in a different state, and wishes she had been more present as a parent before she and her ex got divorced, and wishes she could be more present now. In addition to the mythological elements and the realistic-fiction elements, the book also has some speculative-fiction elements/seems to be set in an ominous near-future: there are references to "armed guards in front of the luxury towers" and "vast manta ray drones that hover above the plains states" and "hospital trains, one car after another acting as a trauma unit, coursing through the heartland," and California, somehow, has "outsourced its earthquake activity" to the Rust Belt city where the main character was born, where her mother still lives. There's also a mysterious group with supernatural powers (maybe?) that helps the narrator and other trans people.
I kind of wanted more of the speculative stuff, but I enjoyed all of the novel's strands and the way that DeNiro weaves them together. There are moments of really great writing (though I wished there had been fewer typos), from the book's first sentence on. I mean, this is a great first sentence: "You have struggled for a long time as to whether you have a soul or not—whether anyone does—or if you're only a gathering of restless and ginned-up personality traits brought together to fool yourself into believing that there is, in fact, a you." There's also a section of the book I loved where Keats's "Ode to Psyche" is quoted in full, interspersed with snippets of the main character's thoughts about/experiences with Tinder and the dudes she's interacted with there. I also love how someone the main character dates shows the main character "a flowchart of how everyone in her polycule was connected to each other, and it was like a star chart from the Age of Exploration," and how then, after that relationship ends, the main character considers this: "you had to earn your own circle of caring people, your own star chart that would lead you to voyage somewhere else, somewhere else you needed to be more than anything."
If you need a mythology refresher (which I did, before I started reading this): per Apuleius's Metamorphoses, Psyche was a) the goddess of the soul, b) Cupid's wife and c) a great beauty who was transformed from being a mortal woman to being immortal after a series of trials. This all seems relevant to consider when thinking about the main character of this short novel, who's an unnamed trans woman in Minnesota who is figuring things out as best she can. She misses her son, who lives with her ex-wife in a different state, and wishes she had been more present as a parent before she and her ex got divorced, and wishes she could be more present now. In addition to the mythological elements and the realistic-fiction elements, the book also has some speculative-fiction elements/seems to be set in an ominous near-future: there are references to "armed guards in front of the luxury towers" and "vast manta ray drones that hover above the plains states" and "hospital trains, one car after another acting as a trauma unit, coursing through the heartland," and California, somehow, has "outsourced its earthquake activity" to the Rust Belt city where the main character was born, where her mother still lives. There's also a mysterious group with supernatural powers (maybe?) that helps the narrator and other trans people.
I kind of wanted more of the speculative stuff, but I enjoyed all of the novel's strands and the way that DeNiro weaves them together. There are moments of really great writing (though I wished there had been fewer typos), from the book's first sentence on. I mean, this is a great first sentence: "You have struggled for a long time as to whether you have a soul or not—whether anyone does—or if you're only a gathering of restless and ginned-up personality traits brought together to fool yourself into believing that there is, in fact, a you." There's also a section of the book I loved where Keats's "Ode to Psyche" is quoted in full, interspersed with snippets of the main character's thoughts about/experiences with Tinder and the dudes she's interacted with there. I also love how someone the main character dates shows the main character "a flowchart of how everyone in her polycule was connected to each other, and it was like a star chart from the Age of Exploration," and how then, after that relationship ends, the main character considers this: "you had to earn your own circle of caring people, your own star chart that would lead you to voyage somewhere else, somewhere else you needed to be more than anything."
November 11, 2025
i hesitate to even criticize this book because it’s so obviously personal. i appreciate the fun she has with breaking form and the unreliable, sometimes psychedelic narration. i like the narrator and her choices at most times. the history and mythology references were genuinely interesting and added to the story. i appreciate the layers to everything that can sometimes be missed on a first read. some of my favorite points in the book were when i had to backtrack and clarify something from pages ago.
this was also my least favorite part of reading when it was due to a somewhat obvious editing error. even with the benefit of the doubt rightfully given to a small publisher, the book reads like a rough draft at some points, with halting typos and half-baked metaphors that disrupt the flow of the novel. i think the meat of the story and form has really great potential for a cult classic of trans literature. some of the execution just lacked a bit of refinement. many of the characters just seemed flat and uninteresting, like there was no real reason to engage with them. i liked her son and mother, but mostly because they’re the only characters that are given unique voices and motivations that seem grounded in the world outside the narrators head (i suppose that’s the whole point?)
all in all, it was a fun read and id be happy to read more from anya. we need more stories about late transitioners and the worlds they inhabit. beautiful work!
this was also my least favorite part of reading when it was due to a somewhat obvious editing error. even with the benefit of the doubt rightfully given to a small publisher, the book reads like a rough draft at some points, with halting typos and half-baked metaphors that disrupt the flow of the novel. i think the meat of the story and form has really great potential for a cult classic of trans literature. some of the execution just lacked a bit of refinement. many of the characters just seemed flat and uninteresting, like there was no real reason to engage with them. i liked her son and mother, but mostly because they’re the only characters that are given unique voices and motivations that seem grounded in the world outside the narrators head (i suppose that’s the whole point?)
all in all, it was a fun read and id be happy to read more from anya. we need more stories about late transitioners and the worlds they inhabit. beautiful work!
January 18, 2024
OKPsyche by Anya Johanna DeNiro is difficult to describe in the best possible way. If you want to be reductive, it's an evocative character study of an unnamed trans woman told in the second person, and she navigates the complexities of adulthood in the style of lyrical magical realism. The plot consists of the narrator moving into a new apartment after her ex-wife and son have moved away, navigating loneliness and self-doubt, new friendships and romantic relationships by seeking help from mysterious benefactors much like the Psyche of greek myth.
However, what I found the most meaningful about the story is how it made me feel, so I want to focus in that rather than narrative details. DeNiro captures the way people experience the world, drifting between what is physically happening and the memories, feelings and emotions this raises in her narrator. She seamlessly transitions between speaking with a delivery person and the ghost of her father, metaphor and literal, mythology and reality. It's bold, overwhelming, and extremely effective in invoking a feeling of precarity. I would recommend it.
However, what I found the most meaningful about the story is how it made me feel, so I want to focus in that rather than narrative details. DeNiro captures the way people experience the world, drifting between what is physically happening and the memories, feelings and emotions this raises in her narrator. She seamlessly transitions between speaking with a delivery person and the ghost of her father, metaphor and literal, mythology and reality. It's bold, overwhelming, and extremely effective in invoking a feeling of precarity. I would recommend it.
April 9, 2025
TW: transphobia, domestic abuse, drug/alcohol use
3.5*, rounded down
I'm a little worried that I just didn't get this book. The prose was gorgeous and I loved threads of the story, but I wasn't fully connecting the pieces together. I wasn't a huge fan of the 2nd person POV, either, but I think that this book tackles a lot of heavy topics with sensitivity, and I think that the militaristic world in the process of destruction by climate change being touched on lightly was an interesting choice.
Maybe I'll think about this more and change my score later, but for now, I will stick with my confused 3.5*.
3.5*, rounded down
I'm a little worried that I just didn't get this book. The prose was gorgeous and I loved threads of the story, but I wasn't fully connecting the pieces together. I wasn't a huge fan of the 2nd person POV, either, but I think that this book tackles a lot of heavy topics with sensitivity, and I think that the militaristic world in the process of destruction by climate change being touched on lightly was an interesting choice.
Maybe I'll think about this more and change my score later, but for now, I will stick with my confused 3.5*.
June 12, 2024
emotional read i felt so weighed down and could really feel what the narrator was feeling in these moments. scared for her even if i knew in the end it was going to be okay because i could tell her fears were heightened because of who she is and what she’s been through. i’ll never understand what it is to be a trans woman and im glad i read this
i wish there was more about her imaginary friends and that black mirror robot boyfriend Oriole secret society thing that was really cool but it didn’t really go anywhere !!!!!!
i wish there was more about her imaginary friends and that black mirror robot boyfriend Oriole secret society thing that was really cool but it didn’t really go anywhere !!!!!!
August 7, 2024
I will be a much older woman before I understand everything this book has to say, and everything I have to say about it. The story is beautiful and wrenching and so very different from my own life, even my own trans life. But there is a selfhood in it, a version of me that desperately needed to read this book and needs to read it again soon. It's a perfect book, if not technically, then emotionally. There are killer lines everywhere, and trans women have seldom known so kind a hand.
This book is beauty and love incarnate.
This book is beauty and love incarnate.
May 26, 2025
This is such a beautiful, tender book about an unnamed trans woman. She thinks about the time she was married, her desire to see her son and be seen as a mother, her childhood and her parents, and how much she wants a boyfriend. There are times when she talks to friends, both real and imaginary. She also can't decide what to do about the automaton boyfriend she's been keeping in a box under her bed. Themes in this novella are motherhood, relationships (romantic and platonic), and selfhood. I really, really adore this book and I am excited to read it again someday.
January 23, 2024
The first half of this book really captured my attention and the narration of transness felt real and painstakingly relatable at some points, the main character was easily liked and I empathised greatly with her and her narration.
I did enjoy the writing style however the second half of the book lost me with the addition of certain elements. The metaphors used fell flat and quite often felt they were trying to be big and grand whilst not really hitting the mark.
I did enjoy the writing style however the second half of the book lost me with the addition of certain elements. The metaphors used fell flat and quite often felt they were trying to be big and grand whilst not really hitting the mark.
April 18, 2024
3.25
Setting: Minnesota
Rep: trans protagonist
This was a strange little book. It's a quick read at about 140 pages and at times I really enjoyed it and certain passages stood out, but it also didn't make much sense and I wish it had been more grounded in itself, though I guess the writing and the weird semi-dystopia are potentially reflections of the character herself, who is in a process of development.
Setting: Minnesota
Rep: trans protagonist
This was a strange little book. It's a quick read at about 140 pages and at times I really enjoyed it and certain passages stood out, but it also didn't make much sense and I wish it had been more grounded in itself, though I guess the writing and the weird semi-dystopia are potentially reflections of the character herself, who is in a process of development.
October 8, 2024
(3.5 rating) I’m not used to this style of story telling, but it was so captivating. It was a lot more emotional than I anticipated it to be, so it took me a while to get through it. I believe the pairing of the trans experience from this author’s perspective with the style of surrealistic fiction was brilliant, as it kept me in this dream state that recognized reality. I’ll be thinking about this one for a while.
January 2, 2026
The prose is often arresting and sometimes beautiful. Some plot lines vanished - the box boyfriend was intriguing and just never reappeared. The family storyline was very moving. The second person narration style was off-putting for me but that is personal preference. Overall a lovely read and the main character, whose name we don’t learn explicitly, will stay with me. I loved the classical references throughout and the way the myth of Psyche is woven through the narrative.
February 18, 2024
this was... brutal and beautiful and complex and confusing. I absolutely loved every second of it. I'm not trans but so much of what the unnamed protagonist feels and expresses was so relatable. the opening paragraph is one of the most compelling I have ever read -- I was hooked immediately. highly, highly recommend if you like speculative fiction.
May 7, 2024
So poignant and relatable. Her tale of transition is a tale of adversity but one with pieces we all know and have encountered, unfortunately though, she has to experience them all. This is a fever dream of weirdness and learning to love yourself, while trying to be part of a difficult world around you. It was a pleasure to read.
May 29, 2024
Okay I am angry about this book in the best possible way for 3 reasons:
1. I am angry at how real this all felt. I recognised far too much of this
2. I am angry that so many people have to suffer in this situation.
3, I am angry that someone is able to write a book this good and smart. Every page I found another reason to be impressed.
Darn you, DeNiro!!!!
1. I am angry at how real this all felt. I recognised far too much of this
2. I am angry that so many people have to suffer in this situation.
3, I am angry that someone is able to write a book this good and smart. Every page I found another reason to be impressed.
Darn you, DeNiro!!!!
June 11, 2024
Excellent. I have to admit when I saw it was in 2nd person I was hesitant, but this POV really drew me in. The writing creates a dream-like stream of consciousness that blurs the distinction between reality and unreality, keeping the reader off balanced.
Captured the feelings of being trans and navigating a non-accepting world. Re-read worthy & recommended.
Captured the feelings of being trans and navigating a non-accepting world. Re-read worthy & recommended.
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