Rose Dommu’s New Novel, ‘Best Woman,’ Is The Trans Rom-Com Of Your Dreams

Featured Image: Rose Dommu. Photo Courtesy of Dommu.

“I’m a secret romantic,” Rose Dommu admits shortly into our first meeting. “I come across, I’ve been told, as kind of jaded and cynical. That’s the performance of myself that I put online. But at heart, I’m a double Cancer. I’m very emotional, and I am really a romantic.” 

Until this year, being a jaded and acerbic online persona was what Dommu was known for. In her short-lived Substack, Mall Goth, on her podcast, Like A Virgin, and through her biggest platform, Netflix’s queer-oriented social media account Most, Dommu was a cheeky, clever cultural commentator with decisive taste and a biting sense of humor. And she was a name, at least to people who might also casually reference personalities like Hunter Harris or Bald Ann Dowd. 

But none of those voices felt quite like her. At least, not as much as Best Woman, Dommu’s upcoming debut novel. The rom-com is Dommu’s first venture into fiction (at least professionally), and it’s a stark break from the cool-girl internet vibe she’s spent so long cultivating. Heavily inspired by ‘90s romantic comedies like My Best Friend’s Wedding—with a trans, sapphic spin—Best Woman doesn’t quite leave Dommu’s sharp humor behind, but it’s a strikingly earnest change of pace. 

Published under Penguin, it’s also a major shift for the mainstream romance genre, which has only just begun to expand its reach to queer love stories—much less those with trans protagonists. But, as Dommu tells me, it was high time both author and industry made a change.

At any given moment, Dommu is juggling a mass of ideas for her nascent fiction career—novels, spin-offs, even screenplays. But no other story could possibly have been her debut. She grew up obsessed with rom-coms, captivated by ‘80s and ‘90s classics like Never Been Kissed, You’ve Got Mail, and Moonstruck. “Those movies are so beautifully flawed,” she says, “and they exist so far outside of reality in a way that’s really comforting.” 

After a childhood of rom-coms, Dommu is still drawn to romance as an adult, though her literary sensibilities lean toward gay period romances, what she calls “codpiece rippers” by authors like Alexis Hall, Cat Sebastian, and KJ Charles. “In a week on Fire Island, I can plow through like five codpiece rippers and only want more,” says Dommu. In short, Dommu says, Best Woman was “the story I could write most competently. I was saying to myself, if I’m going to write any book, I know I can write this book. Let me use this as a way to prove that to myself, and to the world.” 

Best Woman captures all of those inspirations. Dommu’s debut follows Julia, a free-spirited, if somewhat socially awkward, trans woman who pauses her life in New York and returns to her Florida hometown to serve as best woman at her brother’s wedding. She’s already juggling a hometown situationship, a conservative sister-in-law, and a pack of adult mean girl bridesmaids when she discovers that Kim Cameron, her unattainable high school crush, is the maid of honor. When Julia blurts out a little white lie to capture Kim’s attention, she may finally have a chance with the cool girl of her dreams—so long as she can make it through the wedding celebrations without anyone blowing her cover. Best Woman exists in the lovely, almost-real fantasy world where former high school crushes fall in love over go-kart racing and pop stars swoop in with trunks of couture to save the day. 

Appropriately, Dommu’s path to writing Best Woman feels like a rom-com heroine’s backstory. After dropping out of college in 2008, she did what any leading lady of the genre does when it’s time to start her grown-up life: moved to New York City with dreams of becoming an artist. While living in Brooklyn, she reconnected with a hometown friend, one of the only other queer kids from her high school, and in the early 2010s, built a new, queer life in the city. 

Dommu, a self-described “club kid” by nature, began organizing art events, surrounding herself with the next generation of New York’s visual art scene. It was during this period that Dommu—who came out as trans several years later—first started experimenting with her gender presentation, first surrounded herself with entire friend groups made up of other queer people, and first truly felt like a part of the community. 

Then, like Kate Hudson in How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days, or Drew Barrymore in Never Been Kissed, or Jennifer Garner in 13 Going on 30 (etc., etc.), Dommu found herself working at a magazine. At Out—an online lifestyle magazine geared toward LGBTQ+ readers—Dommu built a reputation as a witty, sardonic voice on all things queer pop culture, one she’d carry with her to later projects like Paper and Mall Goth, and eventually to her fiction writing. More importantly, she met Fran Tirado, her eventual best friend and podcast co-host, the Carrie Fisher to her Meg Ryan. 

Since leaving Out in 2020, Dommu’s role in the culture had pivoted from journalist to internet personality. In 2022, she graduated from X to her Substack, Mall Goth, where she fleshed out her thoughts into full-length stories that blended cultural criticism and diaristic personal essays. Until 2024, she also co-hosted the weekly podcast Like A Virgin, in which Dommu and Tirado dug deep into their pop cultural obsessions, in their words, “giving yesterday’s pop culture with today’s takes.” If she wasn’t quite creating art, she was at least a centerpiece in the cultural conversation about art. 

Then last year, Dommu was prepping a new episode of Like A Virgin with Tirado when she mentioned something in passing that she now realizes sounded pretty dire: the podcast felt like her sole creative outlet. Tirado’s response was quick and cutting: “What we’re doing isn’t art. It’s not even creative.” By then, the pair had been friends long enough for Tirado to suspect it was exactly what Dommu needed to hear. While the pair are no longer co-hosts, Dommu says she was right.

“I had for so long defined myself as a ‘creative,’ an artist, because I came up in proximity with other artists,” says Dommu. “In that moment, I realized how far away from that I had strayed.” But she wasn’t offended by Tirado’s assertion. Podcasting didn’t feel creative. “It lit this fire under me that I needed to take control of my life. I needed to get back to the point where I really felt like an artist again.” 

In many ways, Best Woman is the brainchild of that conversation with Tirado. But artistic impostor syndrome had long been a pattern in Dommu’s life. “I’ve needed to prove to myself throughout the years that I could be a writer, that ‘writer’ was an identity that I could claim,” says Dommu. There was only one way to do that: by writing.

“I’ve had a somewhat nontraditional path,” says Dommu. “I always felt like I was fighting so hard for every byline, every staff position, every raise. I was never waiting around for someone to tell me I was allowed to do something. I was always reaching and grasping it for myself.” 

So when the realization hit that her time in journalism had run its course, there was no waiting for permission. “I spent my whole life with the intention that one day I was going to write books. But the thing they don’t tell you is that no one’s going to say, ‘Okay, you’re allowed to be a novelist.’ You have to just write a novel.”  

Months before its release, a narrative was already building around Best Woman and its author: Dommu was on the frontlines of a new genre, the trans rom-com. She’s skeptical of the superlative. 

“The word ‘forefront’ is scary,” says Dommu. Sure, Best Woman is a trans rom-com in a genre with historically few LGBTQ+ protagonists—much less funny ones—and it’s being published under a Big 5 imprint, about as mainstream as novels can get. And sure, Julia is a trans woman protagonist in a role usually reserved for the likes of Julia Roberts and an Emily Henry protagonist, with the mainstream backing to boot. But Dommu says Best Woman is the tip of the iceberg. 

“More than anything, I see myself in a legacy of other queer writers, and especially trans writers.” Before there was Best Woman, there was Gretchen Felker Martin’s post-apocalyptic trans feminist horror Manhunt, and before that, there was Torrey Peters’ watershed family saga, Detransition Baby. (Best Woman has already received love from Peters, who blurbed the novel, writing that it “absolutely sparkles.”) I point out to Dommu that these novels are far from rom-coms, but she says the connection runs deeper. They’re stories in which queerness and transness aren’t just facts of life, but the stories’ driving force.

She’s hesitant to call herself an innovator, but Dommu will at least admit that Best Woman is something new—not just for the rom-com genre overall, but even among the small canon of queer rom-coms that came before it. “The thing I most wanted to do with this novel was to write a story in which my character’s queerness was actually integral to the plot, in a way that the plot actually could not exist if this character wasn’t queer.” 

Best Woman is officially out on September 23. Preorder your copy of Best Woman here and follow Dommu on Instagram for more.