Description
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.
Author: McKenzie Wark
Publisher: Verso
Published: 09/26/2023
Pages: 176
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.80w x 0.70d
ISBN13: 9781804292617
ISBN10: 1804292613
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | LGBTQ+
- Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs
- Biography & Autobiography | Philosophers
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.
Author: McKenzie Wark
Publisher: Verso
Published: 09/26/2023
Pages: 176
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.80w x 0.70d
ISBN13: 9781804292617
ISBN10: 1804292613
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | LGBTQ+
- Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs
- Biography & Autobiography | Philosophers
About the Author
McKenzie Wark is the author of A Hacker Manifesto, The Beach Beneath the Street, General Intellect, Sensoria and Capital is Dead, among other books. She lives and teaches in New York City.