Author Samantha Josephs
Publisher G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Pub Date October 6, 2026
Quick Take
Some books you read. Others you devour on the couch past midnight while your tea goes cold. Carrying belongs firmly in the second camp. Samantha Josephs’ debut follows a stealth trans housewife who finds herself impossibly pregnant. It reads like Chuck Palahniuk wandered into a Beverly Hills salon. The result is gross, hilarious and breakneck. Underneath all that sits one of the sharpest books about womanhood we’ve read this year.
About Samantha Josephs
Samantha Josephs is a trans writer and semi-retired drag queen from New York City, now based in Los Angeles. Before turning to fiction, she wrote for podcasts, video games, apps and erotica. That last one tracks once you’ve read a page of this book. Her comic timing is impeccable. She knows exactly when to cut a scene, like someone who has worked a room. Carrying is her first novel. It arrives with the swagger of a writer who knows exactly how far she can push you.
What Is Carrying About?
Meet Martha, the Los Angeles housewife other housewives quietly resent. She does salon-quality blowouts at home and serves dinners that look like a magazine spread. Her husband and stepdaughter adore her. She is also a trans woman, so deeply stealth that her own family has no idea. That turns her husband’s sweet wish for another baby into a logistical nightmare. Her solution is to stage miscarriages. Nobody commits to a bit like Martha.
Then her body starts to turn on her. A mysterious chronic illness sends her chasing experimental treatments. Those treatments awaken some deeply strange appetites. Soon Martha faces the one scenario her meticulously built life never planned for. Against every law of biology, she is pregnant.
Shock Lit With a Fresh Manicure
Maybe you grew up reading Palahniuk under the covers, flinching through “Guts” and then telling all your friends. If so, you’ll recognize the energy here. Josephs knows exactly where your gag reflex lives, and she pays it regular visits. There is boofing in this book. It matters to the plot far more than you could ever predict. Josephs plays it so deadpan that you’ll laugh before you’ve processed what you just read.
The publisher pitches it as The Substance meets John Waters. That’s fair, though it undersells how tightly Josephs controls the chaos. The prose is flashy and quick, and the chapters snap shut like a compact mirror. Every grotesque turn lands on a punchline or a gut punch, sometimes literally both.
Then there’s the immaculate conception angle, maybe the book’s sneakiest trick. Josephs takes the oldest miracle story in Western culture and hands it to a trans woman hiding in plain sight. At first it plays as a wicked theological joke. The longer you sit with it, the more tender it becomes.
The Heart Under All That Hairspray
Peel back the gore and the gags, and Carrying turns out to be a sharp book about womanhood as labour. Martha’s perfection is a performance she can never stop giving. Josephs makes you feel every hour of the shift: the grooming, the cooking, the smiling, the constant vigilance. Few writers have captured so clearly how exhausting it is to perform the right kind of womanhood.
Pregnancy only raises the stakes. The novel is frank about what motherhood takes from a body and a mind. There are cravings and swelling, plus the eerie sense of something taking over from the inside. Plenty of cis women will recognize their own pregnancies in Martha’s horror, which is part of the point. In Josephs’ view, the costs of womanhood land on anyone who lives it. She has no interest in debating who has “earned” the right to pay them.
Above all, this is a love letter to trans women. Josephs refuses to make Martha a lesson or a martyr. Her heroine is vain, selfish, scheming and occasionally monstrous. She’s a full-blooded antihero in the tradition of every great unhinged leading lady. Getting to be that messy on the page is its own kind of freedom. It’s a gift to readers who rarely see a trans heroine with that much range.
Is Carrying Worth Reading?
Absolutely, with one caveat for the squeamish. Expect explicit body horror, medical content, pregnancy loss themes and bodily detail that will follow you to dinner. If that sounds like a good time, this one’s for you. Palahniuk fans who miss a novel that truly shocks them will eat it up. Readers of Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt or Alison Rumfitt’s Brainwyrms will find a funnier cousin here. Ditto anyone who watched The Substance through their fingers and loved every second.
Final Verdict
Carrying is funny, filthy, furious and surprisingly moving. Josephs empties the shock lit playbook, then uses your stunned silence to say something real. She has plenty to say about bodies, performance and what it costs to be a woman. It’s a five-star debut from a writer we’ll follow closely. We can’t wait to see what she gives birth to next.
G.P. Putnam’s Sons published Carrying on October 6, 2026.
