Sloane Murphy Is The Bard Of Chicago’s Drunk Trans Women

There are two recurring trans women named Carolina in Sloane Murphy’s short story collection Shut Up I Love You I’ll Call You Tomorrow. One’s nicknamed North, and the other’s nicknamed South, but nobody can seem to keep track of which is which. “Most of the time she just responds when people call her South,” one of the stories says about North, who’s the elder of the two. “At least no one was calling her Old Carolina.”

This is just one of the details in Murphy’s debut that reminded me of the best Hold Steady albums, where casts of lushly described, hard-partying outsiders self-destruct during nights that feel as exciting as they are dangerous. The big difference is that the women in Murphy’s stories are trans, which means their stakes are even higher.

Edited by Emily Zhou, who wrote 2023’s essential short story collection Girlfriends, Murphy’s Shut Up I Love You does for Trans Chicago what Zhou did for Ann Arbor and Brooklyn. This book announces a talented young writer who crafts stories with a vivid sense of time and place, filled with recognizable conversations and sly humor, punctuated by a willingness to stare at the abyss. But while being trans in 2023 was no great shakes, Murphy’s collection arrives at a time when the alarm bells ring even louder—when we can’t even watch sports on TV without seeing political ads from one state or another trying to demonize us, trying to tell people we don’t deserve to live as we are.