Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta

A brave, exciting new writer. TAYARI JONES, author of AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE

The raucous, irreverent and heart-wrenching story of a trans woman’s re-entry into life on the outside after over twenty years in a men’s prison, told over one whirlwind Fourth of July weekend.

Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a robbery that went wrong, she was still going by the name she’d grown up with. But not long after her conviction she took the name Carlotta and began to live as a woman, an expression of selfhood that the prison authorities rejected, keeping Carlotta trapped in an all-male cell block, abused by both inmates and guards, and often placed in solitary.

After her fifth appearance before the parole board, Carlotta is at last granted conditional freedom and returns home to a much-changed and gentrified Brooklyn, where she struggles to reconcile with the son she left behind, to reunite with a family reluctant to accept her true identity, and to avoid any minor parole infraction that might get her sent back inside.

Sweeping the reader through seemingly every street of Brooklyn, much as Leopold Bloom does in Joyce’s Ulysses does through Dublin, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta is both dazzlingly ambitious and fantastically entertaining.