Artist on artist: Torrey Peters on the ‘pure pleasure’ of Elif Batuman

Torrey Peters is an American writer and author who catapulted herself onto the literary scene with her 2021 debut novel, Detransition, Baby.

Winner of the PEN/Hemingway award for debut fiction, and named one of the best 100 books of the 21st century by The New York Times, Detransition, Baby is the story of three women – transgender and cisgender – whose lives collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires around gender, motherhood, and sex.

Following on from this debut success, 2025 saw the release of Peters’ much anticipated second book, Stag Dance – which she joined us here at the Southbank Centre to celebrate in May of this year. A collection of three novellas and the titular novel, Stag Dance explores the nuances of trans life through Peters’ astute and acidly funny lens.

Like Peters, Elif Batuman – author of the memoir The Possessed and novels Either/Or and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Idiot – is a writer known for her perceptive observations and use of humour. So it’s perhaps of little surprise that the former considers herself a significant fan of the latter, a fandom she was happy to discuss with us as part of our Artist on artist series.

I remember very specifically encountering her work for the first time. It was an article in Harper’s Magazine in 2009 called ‘The Murder of Leo Tolstoy’, which is a joke of course because no one killed Leo Tolstoy, he died of natural causes. But what made the piece so brilliant, for me, was that she undertook a proper investigation; she went to a Tolstoy conference, and she laid out all the suspects who could’ve murdered him and why. The piece was presented in Harper’s as non-fiction, and yet the crucial event being investigated was entirely fictional – that event existed only in the author’s imagination, but since she was a real person, and her imagination is real, this non-event was legitimately smuggled into non-fiction.

I was in my twenties doing a writing programme in non-fiction and here was this person, only a couple of years older, who had entirely broken apart the ideas of fiction and non-fiction in a really funny and esoteric essay that did all the things you’re not supposed to do. It was a story about being a grad student, and the one thing you learn about being a grad student is don’t write about being a grad student – nobody cares. So, here’s this person, who is my generation, who has not only broken the fiction-non-fiction binary, but has done it hilariously, and from that moment I knew this was a person I really wanted to pay attention to. I even tried to write my thesis on that Harper’s piece. I was studying comparative literature, and I was supposed to write about something in Spanish, yet I still tried to sneak in a way to write about ‘The Murder of Leo Tolstoy’. Sadly, I had a particularly strict course advisor, who rejected all my attempts to do so.

The way that fiction and non-fiction become almost indeterminable in her writing is really interesting. The books she writes about, and facets of her own life and preoccupations often get muddled up, so whilst she’s writing journalism for The New Yorker, she also writes her first novel The Idiot, and I think the way she jumbles up facts and literature within each of these mediums, is reflective of her own life in that moment. You can read The Idiot as autofiction; there are stories, and settings, and characters in there that you know from reading non-fiction essays in The Possessed, you know that things in The Idiot are things she has personally experienced; there are almost the same jokes, the same sentences. You start questioning whether this is a fictional novel, or another piece of non-fiction, and so it becomes a kind of autofiction – but not in a regimented way – because her boundaries have become so much less defined.

What I enjoy about her writing is that, because it’s autofiction-esque, any questions I may have about it will eventually get answered. If there’s an aspect or character I want to know more about, I trust her to eventually explain them. There’s clearly more to come from her, so I shouldn’t demand that she explain anything to me. To do so would be premature, it would be like demanding of Marcel Proust after the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, to know more about this character, or that idea, when if you wait you’ll get a few hundred pages in which you are sure to hear about it. So I don’t demand anything of her, because if I just have patience, I believe I’ll get the answers.

In her first book, The Possessed, she makes a really interesting argument; that you can live your life reading books. She effectively argues that reading books is not separate from living your life. The way you understand yourself and the way you narrativise yourself in the world is often through books, as she has done in almost living her life through Russian literature to that point. Of course this is, in a way, a 19th century idea, but by writing it in this witty magazine style she makes it modern, and expands upon it, and it was just so good and so funny.

Anybody who loves books ends up loving the work of other people who love books. I think that’s one of the ideas that drew me to connect with Elif’s work in the first place; loving stories and books so much that you end up casting your own life in the terms set by those books. I’m somebody who has spent time reinventing myself and I think a lot of the ideas about how I’ve done that have come from books; they might not have been the same books as those that guided Elif, but the method is the same even if the books are different.

I want to observe things the way that she’s able to observe them. Everything she does is so well observed. She’s able to look at something and see it in a really unfamiliar way; she’ll defamiliarise to the extent that when it’s presented back to you as a reader, you get a genuine surprise that this thing that had seemed so unfamiliar is something you knew all along that’s been so perfectly observed. I really admire that. And I hope to do it the way she does it.

I’ve been inspired by the way she is able to use humour to invite you in and make you want to keep reading. There’s pure pleasure in that. Her turns of phrase, and her descriptions are so perfectly observed and so humorous; even when she’s writing about really serious topics, she does so with lightness. She can write such funny sentences, and she’s also willing to be corny, able to be very earnest, and to be knowing. And so whilst my humour isn’t quite the same as hers, I do strive to deploy humour in a similar way, even when the subject is very serious.

She’s unique among the writers I love in that she’s of my generation, yet she’s been doing this for 20 years. There aren’t many millennial writers you can follow along a 20 year career in real time, and watch a real ethical arc to their work. I was 39 when I published my first book, so with me you don’t get to see everything I did, all the mistakes I may’ve made, or the ideas I’ve revised since I was in my early twenties, but with Elif it’s all out there, and she’s been doing it continuously for two decades. That kind of longevity is rare amongst my generational cohort and I feel very lucky to have been following along that journey.

‘The Murder of Leo Tolstoy’ is the piece of hers I go back to the most. I’ve read it countless times, and every time I find it terrific and moving. If I was Elif I’d probably be frustrated with that answer, because it’s a 20-year-old piece and she’s done so much since, so I’m sorry to her for picking it, but it’s not that this particular essay is better than everything that has come after it, but that everything that has come after it is interesting to me in the way that it resonates with that very early work. We can’t all be the young naive comic grad student at the Tolstoy conference forever, and so her later work reveals ways in which some of the ideas in her earlier work may have been immature. In that first essay there are several middle-aged and older people who she turns into comic figures, and of course one day she will be one of those older comic figures, so I’d love to see her one day bring it full circle and share that kind of reverse perspective.

I’ve been a different kind of fan of Elif Batuman as she’s become a different kind of writer. I think the biggest challenge to my fandom has been the way in which she’s essentially rebuked a lot of her own work. A lot of her earlier stories are about falling in love with guys and being obsessed with guys, and then with Either/Or she begins to revise these ideas, and revisit them through a feminist lens, suggesting that it wasn’t so much that she really liked this guy, she was just programmed to do so. My initial response to that was, ‘what? You’re only just discovering feminism now? You’re only just discovering queerness?’ I was almost embarrassed for her, and so my fandom did drop for a while. But very quickly I’d reevaluated my reaction, and I realised that to do this, to very openly show an evolution in your approach and your process, is actually amazing. And that willingness to rebuke and question her earlier work is now, for me, the most interesting thing about her writing.

She writes about her changing feelings and attitudes really earnestly, in a way I really admire. Whereas most of us might claim to have always thought this or that, she’s not afraid to show she’s evolved, or to consider how she may previously have been wrong. And that’s incredibly brave; we’ve all missed little things in our life then pretended we knew them all along. For me, just now with what’s going on with the anti-trans legislations in the US, I’m thinking ‘maybe I shouldn’t trust the government’, which is of course what anarchists and friends have been telling me my whole life. And it would be easy, and less embarrassing, for me to pretend an idea I should’ve read at 19 was something I knew all along, rather than admitting that I’m 43 and just figuring this out. So whilst part of my fandom of Elif leads me to think, ‘no, don’t change because those early books and essays are great,’ there’s something truly amazing to me about seeing someone able to, and willing to, undertake a measured revision of their work and everything they thought they knew, and her writing has only gotten better through doing that.

Her ethical engagement with her own work has been really instructive to me. In her early writing she really believes in the power of Russian literature; she effectively makes her name on her appreciation for Russian writing. Then with the outbreak of the war in Ukraine she begins to question this and ask whether Russian literature is in fact a colonial enterprise, and in that sense has she in effect been an ambassador for colonial enterprise. And I admire her so much for that.

I would be really interested to see her write about queerness. I don’t mean in terms of who, or what type of person that you’re attracted to, but in the way that much of her work has explored the ways that men and women interact with each other. And so I think it would be interesting, given she’s clearly informed about queer and trans lenses, to see the ways that some of her early convictions – on things like how boys should be, or the ways in which women should behave towards boys – might get further developed. But I say that with a caveat, which is that one of the joys of reading her writing is that she never comes at a topic directly, and the way that the happenstance of her own interests and the events of her life establish the forms of her writing mean that I would never want to prescribe her to do anything. I think she has to live a thing in order to speak it.

I’ve never met her, but I also don’t necessarily feel I have to. Everyone I know who has met her says she’s lovely, but I don’t feel the need to meet her, because what she’s created through her writing is so enriching that I’m happy just to accept that from her.

If I was to meet Elif, I’d rather meet her in a non-literary context. It would be great to meet in, say, a sauna at some spa in the Alps, and hear her observations on our surroundings; what the place is about, why the people are doing this or that. I’d love to be there for the germination of her observations; to be in the place those observations are generated rather than always sitting with the end product would be really fascinating. I guess that would be the least likely place for us to meet because given we both love books so much, we’re much more likely to meet in a literary context, but it would be more interesting to stand in a city street with her looking at the pigeons together. I’d like that.

When I hear Elif Batuman’s name the first thing I feel is a sense of delight. And I’ll picture her book covers. I’ve seen lots of photographs of her, but when I think of her I picture the writing more than the person, delightful as I’m sure she is. But the first thing I get is a sense of delight, and a memory of my own delight at her words, and the times I’ve spent delighted.

Torrey Peters was speaking to Glen Wilson

Want to read more articles like this?
We’ve just The Tonic

Get the arts and artists shaping our culture straight to your inbox, every month.

Sign me up