Disappoint Me (2025) -Nicola Dinan
Dinan presents hard-to-answer questions about gender and sexuality and deliberately refuses to indulge readers with a neat answer
Content Warnings: Transphobia, abuse, illness, drug use, alcohol abuse
Favorite Quote: “Just because gay people do it doesn’t make it right.”
Representation: Trans, Trans woman, Chinese
In Disappoint Me, Nicola Dinan picks up where she left off in her debut novel Bellies examining how transness and rigid sexual labels grate against each other beyond hypotheticals and into real-world relationships. In this novel, readers are presented with a developing new relationship between a trans woman named Max and a seemingly open-minded cis man named Vincent. In this relationship, the two grapple with the end of their young adulthoods and what queer temporality looks like in your late thirties.
The novel switches between the present perspective of Max after an accident lands her in the hospital, shaking the foundations of her contentment with life, and flashbacks to Vincent’s gap year trip to Thailand where he developed an intense whirlwind relationship with a beautiful other traveler named Alex.
This novel is far less concerned with portraying a romance as it is with showing the incompatibility of the heteronormative relationship escalator with queerness. Having shifted in the eyes of her cishet college friends after transitioning, Max is now included with in the heteronormative rituals of their weddings and marriages as a bridesmaid. Alongside her lesbian best friend, Max is confronted with images of what could and couldn’t be possible to her as a trans woman in a promising new relationship.
Vincent, meanwhile, is largely detached from Max’s experiences with her transness, but thinks himself to be past the crisis common of cis people in relationships with trans people—how it reflects on their sexual identities, how to navigate public perception, and what that means for family building. Max is not naïve about the potential downfalls she may face in a new relationship as a trans person but feels an undeniable sense of security with the image of Vincent that he presents. Vincent’s past, however, threatens to disrupt his seemingly caring and enlightened character.
Disappoint Me did not disappoint (sorry I had to), but it did leave many questions unanswered. Dinan presents a story that challenges linear temporality and questions what the development of relationships looks like for trans people. Unsurprisingly, this novel refuses to tie these themes up neatly, but rather starts the conversation to be continued outside the boundaries of its pages.