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[A quick note on spoilers: If you want to get very technical, this entire review is a spoiler. Seriously, if the mere mention of the word “spoilers” makes your skin crawl, here’s the short version of this review: Go read Cash Delgado Is Living the Dream. That said, if you’ve read a decent number of sapphic romances, you know all the tropes. Knowing the tropes makes a fair amount of potential spoilers moot. To me, that’s part of the fun—we know what will ultimately happen, but it’s the getting there that makes it so interesting. Anyway, read on at your own peril.]
A couple of weeks ago, I finally gave in—I downloaded TikTok onto my iPad. Not to yuck anyone’s yum, but I’m just not a fan of the app. Or, all told, the entire concept of the thing. At the same time, if I’m so interested in the discourse, I might as well go from whence the discourse came rather than continuing to wait for it as secondhand news.
(If you think I’m going to say something about BookTok next, guess again.)
As I learned almost immediately, everyone is beholden to the great TikTok algorithm. Within mere days, I had been pigeonholed into a handful of very specific topics. One of these very specific topics, which is how we get to Tehlor Kay Mejia’s new novel Cash Delgado Is Living the Dream, is the “Later in Life Lesbian.” Now, for those of you following along at home, as a trans woman who came out later in life, I do technically belong in this category. But that isn’t the point here (nor is the point that “sapphic” is a much more inclusive term than “lesbian”); the point is that between TikTok and Cash Delgado, I’m noticing that this very specific topic has become a more prominent point of conversation and a go-to trope in many of the romance novels that I’ve read lately.
In fact, Cash Delgado Is Living the Dream isn’t even the first novel I’ve discussed here that follows the “later in life lesbian” trope: Ashley Herring Blake’s Astrid Parker Doesn’t Fail treads some of the same ground. I really liked that book, and I really liked Cash Delgado as well.
Single mother Cash Delgado manages a small bar in a small town. Inez, her best friend— what’s that, you say? Cash is going to realize that she loves Inez, who also happens to love Cash? How ever did you know?!?
Again, even though the destination is nothing short of completely obvious, it’s a good writer who makes the journey enjoyable. For me in particular, when that enjoyable journey involves a single parent/child situation, I’m even more impressed. Mejia manages to balance the small-town setting, the central trope, and the parent/child situation, which is enough to enthusiastically recommend Cash Delgado Is Living the Dream. But wait, there’s more…
Perhaps it’s because we’re in the summer of Chappell Roan, but lately it’s felt like there’s an ever-so-small possibility that we’re almost getting ready to be able to have a nuanced conversation about women and sexuality that doesn’t eventually descend into some form of biphobia or other exclusionary discourse. In the beginning of this novel, Cash finds herself hooking up with a guy with whom she’s had a previous relationship. The fact that this guy is the living embodiment of the mistake everyone has in their past becomes clear immediately, and he is a mere twirled-mustache away from being the most stereotypical villain who ever lived. And, sure, Chase is in town to bring an obnoxious chain bar/restaurant into Ridley Falls, which will destroy the scrappy establishment where he used to work and that Cash now manages. That complication is what the plot of the novel hangs on, yes, but the spirit of the novel is propelled forward more so by the fact that the words that best describe Chase are words that end in -phobic.
Because it’s difficult enough for Cash to figure out how she feels about Inez and what that says about her sexuality and her larger identity as a person. If it wasn’t difficult, there wouldn’t be an entire corner of TikTok devoted to it. (There would be so many more videos about make-up in my feed.) “Am I a lesbian?” “Am I bisexual?” “Am I a straight woman who happens to really really like this one woman?” All are legitimate possibilities for Cash (and lots of other women), but these questions wouldn’t matter nearly as much if people like Chase could just be cool for once in their entire lives.
Cash Delgado Is Living the Dream is an extremely fun read that brushes up against some of these questions of cisheteropatriarchy, straight culture, and cultural bereavement as it relates to realizing something significant about your sexuality later in life. If you’re not interested in that particular discourse, don’t worry! You can just boo along with everyone else about how Chase is the literal worst and cheer along about how Parker, Cash’s daughter, is the embodiment of a ray of sunshine. If this discourse is something that you’ve followed or taken part in, then there’s a lot in both Cash’s journey and Inez’s reactions to that journey for you to dig into.
Liv (she/her) is a trans woman, a professor of English, and a reluctant Southerner. Described (charitably) as passionate and strong-willed, she loves to talk (and talk) about popular culture, queer theory, utopias, time travel, and any other topic that she has magpied over the years. You can find her on storygraph and letterboxd @livvalentine.
