Love and Money, Sex and Death: A Memoir

(Hardback)

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After a successful career, a twenty-year marriage, and raising two kids, McKenzie Wark has a particularly extreme midlife crisis: coming out as a trans woman. Changing both social role and bodily form recast her whole relation to the world and reveal it to her as something strange and different. Her past life becomes a stranger to her, a past she can only reclaim by writing to important figures in her life, about the big themes that haunt us all, of love and money, sex and death. Told through a series of letters - to her childhood self, her mother, sister and her past lovers - she grapples with where she has come from and what this change means. She engages with the politics and aesthetics of trans culture and how they impact on her sense of who she is, and who she has been. She confronts difficult memories of her mother's death and her compulsion to write, growing up and her involvement in politics, coming to New York and embracing the counterculture and the realisations and reality of her late transition. Combining the deeply personal and political, Love and Money, Sex and Death is a provocative call to arms that recasts the mould for trans memoirs.

Reviews

Seeing the world unfold from the perspective of a self is easier than seeing that self as a particular folding-up of the world. MacKenzie Wark's special genius, in this wild ride across the late twentieth century and its aftermath, is to offer both perspectives at once, shimmying and shaking between the two with gleeful and brilliant abandon. -- Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History
McKenzie Wark's account of her life to this point fuses friendship and history, love and ideas. Radically honest and beautifully light, her memoir offers brilliant and challenging ways of understanding how fluidly gender is actually lived by those who dare. Like all of her work, it's really a personal manifesto. I was inspired and energized reading this book. -- Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick
A capacious offering to transfeminine truth-witty and wild, soft and scathing, broken-hearted and open-hearted. Moving toward the future by excavating the past, Wark makes space for complexity, innovation, self- determination, and communal possibility in "the sparkle of one's difference." -- Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of The Freezer Door
In writing letters to former selves, mothers, lovers and others McKenzie Wark has captured life lived in and as transformation with rigour and poetry. From an oppressive but formative 1960s Australian childhood, to the physical and intellectual expansiveness of New York City in the 21st century, Wark witnesses her beginnings and endings, her coming and unbecoming. She is bracing, sharp, argumentative and tender all at once -- Sophie Cunningham, author of The Devastating Fever
A sharp epistolary memoir about gender, family, disability, and age...Wark's analysis of gender, sexuality, and queerness is both ebullient and trenchant. * Kirkus Reviews *
Sad and tender and sassy and smart. A love letter to life and transition, to the endless possibilities of the body and the mind, to love itself. -- Fiona Kelly McGregor, author of Iris
Wark is one of the only scholars to take young people seriously-not as a spectacle or site of extraction, but as friends to learn from and hang out with. This lack of judgment, which radiates, not just through the book, but through the author herself, is what is so winning in the end. I am grateful for Love and Money, Sex and Death, and I'm grateful for McKenzie, too. -- Charlie Markbreiter * The New Inquiry *
This memoir plumbs erasures in Wark's personal experiences in order to understand her personal formation outside of the 'born this way' narrative...there's something refreshing, even relieving, about the book's lack of a neat, packaged gender narrative. Love and Money, Sex and Death is a memoir that seeks understanding around a personal formation; it extends that spacious anarchy for others to play in too. * Foreword Reviews *
[This] memoir is an attempt to make sense of the edited self and the person who we once were. A portrait of selfhood under construction. -- Isle McElroy, 24 Books We Cant Wait to Read This Fall * Vulture *
Wark revisits and reexamines her past by writing letters to major figures in her life in her new memoir and a stunning look at transition, history, art, and memory. -- September 2023's Must Read Books * Nylon *

Author Bio

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.