Love and Money, Sex and Death

Told through a series of letters to her childhood self, her mother, sister and past lovers, this reflection on transition, trans politics and culture, motherhood and memory follows the author’s coming out as a trans woman in midlife, which recasts her relation to the world. Illustrations.
"After a successful career, a twenty-year marriage, and raising two kids, McKenzie Wark had a particularly extreme mid-life change: coming out as a trans woman. Changing both social role and bodily form recast her whole relation to the world and revealedit to her as something strange and different. Her past life became a stranger to her, a past she reclaims here by writing to important figures in her life, and addressing the big themes that haunt us all, of love, 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 EverybodyA breathtaking memoir of transition, history, art, and memoryAfter 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.