Nicola Dinan

I wore a dress on the night I first met Ming.It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at their local university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. Confident and witty, a magnetic young playwright, Ming is the perfect antidote to Tom’s awkward energy, and their connection is instant. Tom finds himself deeply and desperately drawn into Ming’s orbit, and on the cusp of graduation, he’s already mapped out their future together. But shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition.From London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, we follow Tom and Ming as they face tectonic shifts in their relationship and friend circle in the wake of Ming’s transition. Through a spiral of unforeseen crises—some personal, some professional, some life-altering—Tom and Ming are forced to confront the vastly different shapes their lives have taken since graduating, and each must answer the essential question: Is it worth losing a part of yourself to become who you are?Buoyed by a voice as tender, effervescent and wryly funny as the cast of characters it centers, Bellies is an unforgettable story of youth, intimacy, hunger and heartbreak, at once boldly original yet fiercely familiar, which unabashedly holds a mirror up to our most vulnerable selves and desires.

After a rough tumble and maybe-serious head injury, a disillusioned trans poet falls for a charming corporate lawyer in a love story that grapples with the explosive ghosts of relationships past, romantic and familial, from the Lambda Award-nominated author of Bellies, Nicola Dinan “Fell down the stairs and woke up a trad wife.” Max is thirty, a published poet and grossly overpaid legal counsel for a tech company. With a lifetime of dysphoria and fuccbois rattling around in her head, Max is plagued with a deep dissatisfaction during what should be the best years of her life. After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First things first: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity. Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent, a corporate lawyer and hobby baker, whose trad friendship group may as well speak a foreign language, and whose Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman. This uncharted territory may have rough terrain, but Vincent cares for Max in a way she’d long given up on as a foolish fantasy. Yet Vincent is carrying his own baggage from his gap year in Thailand a decade prior: an explosive entanglement with a mysterious, gorgeous traveler. Voice-driven, warm, and poignant, Disappoint Me is an exploration of millennial angst, race, trans panic, and the allure of bourgeois domesticity that asks if we are defined by our worst mistakes.

En una fiesta universitaria drag a la que acude con sus amigos, Tom invita a Ming a una copa. Ming es un joven dramaturgo ingenioso, carismático y seguro de sí mismo. Es el antídoto perfecto para el carácter complejo de Tom y, de hecho, su conexión es instantánea. Tom se siente profunda y desesperadamente atraído hacia la órbita de Ming y, a punto de graduarse, ya ha planeado su futuro junto a él. Pero poco después de mudarse a Londres para empezar el siguiente capítulo de sus vidas, Ming anuncia que quiere iniciar un proceso de transición de género.Desde Londres hasta Kuala Lumpur, Nueva York y Colonia, seguimos a Tom y a Ming a medida que afrontan cambios fundamentales en su relación y su círculo de amistades tras la transición de Ming. A través de una serie de crisis inesperadas, tanto personales como profesionales, que les cambian la vida, deben hacer frente a las múltiples formas que han adquirido sus vidas desde que se graduaron.Y deberán responder a una pregunta ¿vale la pena perder una parte de ti mismo para ser quien realmente eres?Con una voz tan tierna, efervescente e irónica como el elenco de personajes que aparece entre sus páginas, La vulnerabilidad de ti y de mí es una historia inolvidable sobre la juventud, la intimidad, el ansia y el dolor que resulta original y, a la vez, familiar. Una novela en la que vemos reflejados nuestros deseos y vulnerabilidades más íntimos.