Love and Money, Sex and Death

A transgender woman reflects on her late transition and coming out, trans politics and culture, motherhood and memory, in this provocative epistolary memoir for readers of Olivia Laing’s Everybody

A breathtaking memoir of transition, history, art, and memory

After a successful career, a twenty-year marriage, and two kids, McKenzie Wark has an acute midlife crisis: coming out as a trans woman. Changing both social role and bodily form recasts her relation to the world. Transition changes what, and how, she remembers. She makes fresh sense of her past and of history by writing to key figures in her life about the big themes that haunt us all—love and money, sex and death.

In letters to her childhood self, her mother, sister, and past lovers, she writes a backstory that enables her to live in the present. The letters expand to address trans sisters lost and found, as well as Cybele, ancient goddess of trans women. She engages with the political, the aesthetic, and the numinous dimensions of trans life and how they refract her sense of who she is, who she has been, who she can still become. She confronts difficult memories that connect her mother’s early death to her compulsion to write, her communist convictions, her coming to New York, the bittersweet reality of her late transition, and the joy to be found in Brooklyn’s trans and raver communities.

About the Author

McKenzie Wark is the author of The Beach Beneath the Street, Capital is Dead, Sensoria and General Intellect among other books. She teaches at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City. In 2017, she came out as transgender. Since then she has published her more experimental trans autofiction Reverse Cowgirl (Semiotexte 2020) and a work that combines both memoir and literary criticism about Kathy Acker, Philosophy for Spiders (Duke UP, 2021). She also edited a special issue of eflux journal and the Critic's Page of Brooklyn Rail on trans |fem | aesthetics, both in 2021, cementing her place as a notable contributor to trans culture.