The Default World

A trans woman tries to exploit her rich Burner friends to get good health insurance before falling under the spell of their glamorous, hedonistic lifestyle.

Years after fleeing San Francisco and getting sober, Indian-American trans woman, Jhanvi, has started making a kind of life for herself in Sacramento, working at a food co-op and trying to save enough money for the gender-affirming surgeries she desperately wants. But when her friend and sometimes-more, Henry, tells Jhanvi that his techie friends in his San Francisco group house spent $100,000 to rent a basement they’re transforming into a sex dungeon, she gets an idea. Jhanvi returns to San Francisco, hatching a plan to marry Henry to get his company’s generous gender-affirming healthcare benefits.

Jhanvi enters a world of rich, beautiful, decadent fire eaters and their lavish promiscuous sex parties. She begins to feel a  Gatsbyesque attraction to the brilliant, hedonistic community she finds herself in, with its bold claims of unconditional love. But do any of her new friends really like her or accept her? Her presence tests the limits of the kind of friendship they espouse, and soon she has to choose between doing what’s right, or what’s right for her. 

This darkly funny novel skewers privileged leftist tech workers and their sometimes oblivious or performative actions and politics, and questions whether found family will still be there when things are hard.