Love and Money, Sex and Death

by McKenzie Wark

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 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.

Genres: Queer, Memoir, Nonfiction, Transgender, Biography, Ebooks, LGBT

166 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 26, 2023

About the author

McKenzie Wark (she/her) is the author of A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International, and The Beach Beneath the Street, among other books. She teaches at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City.

Reviews

[endrju]

I'd read a grocery shopping list written by McKenzie Wark. Seriously though, looking back to Raving and, before that, Reverse Cowgirl, Wark's texts make a rather heady mix of (auto)theory, (auto)fiction, and political manifesto that explode any solid ground that we may hold dear in our everyday lives, especially if some of us (not me though) are white middle-class cishets. In Love and Money, Sex and Death I loved the best those chapters constituting "Others" section, which are most explicitly theoretical though it's not like any of the others lack theory. It's Wark after all. "(To Veronica)" is most exquisitely rendered in a quasi-Socratic dialogue (and how else when one deals with the reversal of Platonism through femmunism) reminiscent of Cat Fitzpatrick's The Call-Out. "(To Venus)" relates Wark's relations to Black trans feminism and I find it fascinating because of the historically different experience of race in the part of the world I live in - which got me thinking about how "our" historical experience and legacy of the non-aligned movement and self-governing socialism can be perhaps used in informing our contemporary trans queer lived experience. Eagerly awaiting for whatever next Wark might throw my way.

[Caroline Van · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn’t read but went to the book talk and am going to put my notes here:
-do something for no reason
-the ravers of today are the children of Dionysus
-distributive mothering
-TV as non-binary parent
-role of displacement of letter writing format.
-“I as another”
-were all an artifice. We make fictions of ourselves that work and don’t work at each year, moment. Reality is fake and you can remember that by a derangement of the sense.

She has an auto theory syllabus I want to read through!!

Kristi from 310 of couples therapy was in the audience and asked McKenzie a question about talk therapy. Kristi said talk therapy was an invasion into the self of one person saying they know you better than you know you. She was basically like fuck u orna guralnik and ur eyebrows.

[Gregor Kulla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Occasionally I’m asked, in a threatening way: Are you a man or a woman? Since I can’t really run away, I usually just answer: Yes.

mckenzie warki kõige uuem raamat! lugesin eile õhtul läbi ja viimane ptk oli gamechanger. olen ta üht raamatut varem lugenud ja teine on pooleli, aga siit sain teada, et tahan ta esimest raamatut lugeda. ta kirjutas siin veel mingitest raamatutest. ta nimetab seda oma autobiograafiaks, trans memuaariks – Memories tell not of who one was but who one wasn’t.. ja siin nüüd mõned nopped, mis mulle meeldisid ja mida olen nõus jagama:

Sometimes gender is stronger than love. If you’d lived, if I’d come out to you—in my cut and folded form—would you have still loved me? I can’t know. Don’t want to know.

“T-girl bottom wisdom: never let anyone fuck you in the ass who has not themselves been fucked in the ass—and enjoyed it.”

As a scholar you are supposed to have a “field.” It’s a colonial mentality. Put your stakes in, claim it, “break new ground,” defend it as if it was your private property. Then “pave the way” for others to suburbanize yet more. You’ll be tempted to think like this, but it’s not your best impulse.

[Dania · Rating 5 out of 5]

(From a list of recommendations by Alana S. Portero, so I was meant to like it).

Not usually one for epistolary books but I really connected with this one. An autobiography that feels unique and universal at the same time. I guess being queer means having these shared experiences. It's also full of these small, surprising details.

It all adds up to something beautiful.

Wark's prose is gripping (she says she was a shitty poet, which I find hard to believe) and I was very moved, especially with the letter to her younger self and the one to her ex-wife.

The whole book is vulnerable and bittersweet, political and funny (most often in a self-depricating way). It touches on grief, on identity, on femininity, on family, on friendship... It's an intimate reading.

[eli · Rating 5 out of 5]

very beautiful, smooth, and moving. also so into a series of letters format for a memoir (like vuong)—we are those people around us or however it goes...

"The diversions will go on a long time. Probably too long. What if you stopped diverting yourself?"

"When I am writing, I am always writing to you. I am always writing to my mother, to this absence you left in me."

"...an aesthetic. One pared of any excrescence. One where form was all. Where anything that wasn't form was meant to reveal it. This was design through subtraction. That was what made it modern. Aesthetics was a practice of extraction, from all that seemed unnecessary, outdated, mystified, raw. What it would take to get to the future was a severing of much that bound us to the past...That, too, is modernism. The spare use of the past, as there to build on, move forward, roll along."

"Maybe there's no essence to the sexed body. Flesh is always-other. It can be diverted, elaborated, ornamented, in different directions, although not without a certain effort. We cut and fold flesh. Like text, like collage."

"There's more of him in me than I like, but I just never related to our father. When we three siblings get together, we tell stories about him in a comic mode, but at the time his temper kept me permanently on edge. He gave me plenty of lessons in why it didn't pay to be too vulnerable."

"One theory popular at the time was that the cultural superstructures had some autonomy from the capitalist economic base. As cultural workers in the superstructures, we could combine theory and practice to make a different kind of media, as the means to undo the dominant ideologies from within."

"Cutting a story together from empty frames."

"...a huge, open warehouse on Parramatta Road in which everyone lived on little covered platforms, reached by ladders, up in its eaves. A legendary place, more or less a commune, subsidized by raves on the vast open floor."

"Modeling is cubism in reverse."

"They're hand-painted signs like the ones you make for protests. They're all the things you felt about my transition that you didn't want to day. Things you spent days and nights out here, alone, painting on these bits of cardboard. The one I'm holding is in black-edged white lettering on eggshell blue: I look at her. I don't yell: 'Your smell is gone! Your orchiectomy is a choice! Don't leave men I love you! I have always'—I eat the cookies."

"Romance along the routes of empire."

"This simple act of claiming pleasure. A glimpse of capacity for delight."

"I've tried ever since to be as honest as is humanly possible, given that humans are animals that deceive firstly themselves."

"We're in our heads a lot so need to get back into our bodies. We dance. Not just dance—we rave. Look around this dance floor: it's all weird brain workers, service workers, sex workers. We're all dancing to the point where selves get lost."

"There's always a gap between the representation and what it presents. That's how all communication works"

"We're always differing from the signs we make. It might be a specifically Western-culture kind of hang-up, but there's a nervousness about this gap between sign and thing."

"Nietzsche called Christianity 'Platonism for the masses.' In Christianity, too, appearances are suspect—are now the work of the devil. Actual things are not to be trusted either, particularly if those things are bodies. Those are corrupt flesh, condemned to die. What is real is something, once again, invisible, untouchable—pure spirit. If spirit refuses to be corrupted by appearances or by the pleasures of the flesh, it can join God in eternity...Secular Western culture inherited a residue of Platonism via Christianity. Even some kinds of Marxists imagine a world of false appearances. For them, it's capitalism. The overthrow of capitalism restores 'man' to the possibility of an authentic life: no more advertising, good riddance to fashion, and bye-bye to alienation. Man is restored to himself as himself."

"You didn't lack for talent or resolve. It's that sliver of self-doubt on top of all the material obstacles."

"I'm thinking about the wearing of white. Perhaps it refers to the Silent Parade, against lynching, a hundred years ago. The children wore white. Something about Blackness mobilizing whiteness on its own behalf."

"Faith is folk fentanyl, but also the callus of a callous world."

"...now that the republic is dying, that its most violent god would be emboldened to demand yet more sacrifices. The decaying rituals of this flailing state seem more wretched every year. The thrall of god as order and order as god. Here in New York, the votaries of this order hang around street corners, in subway stations, devoted to the rosaries of their phones, in their robes of blue, stroking the butts of their glues. Every year, the city pays for more of them from our communal offerings. Spleen of a splenetic world."

"We who drank from the druggy river that bade us shed a manhood we felt as madness."

"A praxis of what can be, rather than of what ought."

"...from that most labile stream of creation that is language"

"To be read within the textures of the interstitial time of everyday life—what could be better? Change life, Rimbaud said."

"As a writer, you just want to pass through, leave offerings, tidy up a bit, and move on."

"You write to make sense, to sort out. It's the essayist's praxis. Writing is a technic extruding from a body, sounding the situation of that body, by the mark. It's a visceral art"

"To shock flesh into awareness."

[Joey Rauch · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, you might ask why this book was wonderful?
A.) Fascination with the epistolary form
B.) Affection for McKenzie Wark and her writing
C.) Writing with a candid sense of care
D.) All of the above!

You guessed correct - it would be the final option!

[Nadin · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We don't have pride, like it was a thing you could buy; we become a pride, a collective noun."

4,5
I loved the letters in the mothers and the lovers sections as well as to McKenzie, her younger selves, but couldn't relate as much to the "others".

[Becky · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved reading this book, many passages were so insightful and moving. At times the epistolary form felt fumbly and broke my immersion, but other moments it really sang.

[malou]

Great collection of texts - loved the letter form (to family, gods, fictional(ized) people, lovers and herself) - beautiful

[Declan Fry]

If you know anything about Australian literature, you know it’s filled with goat fucking. Or, to locate the orgy more precisely: "Australian literature is in the hands of compulsive goat fuckers."

Not long before McKenzie Wark left Australia for life in New York City she knew, even indirectly, how to announce a departure. Would Clive James have done it that way? Would Germaine Greer? Wark, in any case, never truly left: once you escape home, you always find yourself coming back.

There are days when I wonder what my feelings towards the sentiment of goat-fucking are. I suppose at this point I can only say that Wark was perhaps correct at the time to suggest Australia unduly fetishised the novel – goat fucking – and that some of us still do. Though perhaps less so today; conviction is often fleeting, and the essay form has made inroads. At the feast of the goat, the case for the prosecution might nominate the “Text Classics” list, which only includes one work of poetry (despite poetry having produced some of the best writing this continent has known), no works of literary criticism (though there is a work of cultural criticism, Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness), and, of the remaining backlist, works of fiction (primarily novels), books broadly classifiable as colonial-frontier diaries, and a smattering of history, memoir, biography and humour.

The setting for Wark’s hypothesis was an Australian Book Review symposium: Wark, James Bradley and Katharine English gathered to opine on “The State of Australian Fiction” – and on the state of Australian literature post Mark Davis’s incendiary Gangland. Gangland was a tale of two cities, or rather generations: nepotistic, gatekeeping boomers versus Gen X’s Byronic crowd of the mad, bad and dangerous to know. In Davis’s portrait, authors such as Helen Garner and “Melbourne literary gossip columnist” Peter Craven – the appellation is Wark’s, circa ’97 – are pitted against the youth (Christos Tsiolkas, Kathleen Mary Fallon, and a then-38 Wark, among others; youthfulness, in Davis’s book, is more a matter of mindset and intellectual outlook than biology). A somewhat false dichotomy, but an entertaining if not occasionally instructive one: roundtables on the relationship between Australian literature and the goat soon followed.

Is this angst now only liable to be recalled as supplementary embarrassment – Australian literary gossip’s griping and faddish distractions, its mockery kings and queens of snow? What was Davis’s point? What was Wark’s? Well: metaphorical rather than literal, for one (the distinction between virtual and actual is an important one, both in Wark’s work and in the preservation, here, of readerly sensitivities). The goat was the novel, to which other forms of interfacing with the world – experimental essay, poetry, romans both nouveau and less so – were consigned to the status of also-rans. Wark, in short, felt that Australia fetishised the novel form, in its social-realist Anglophone iteration, along with its ways of relating to the world, to the exclusion of other categories. Nothing wrong with a fetish, she said. Just a fetish obsessed with one position.

Read on here: https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2...

and also here: https://meanjin.com.au/essays/911-lon...

[churrosconclipper · Rating 5 out of 5]

siento que esta reseña no puede ser objetiva, porque este no es un libro que se lea desde la distancia. es un libro que te arrastra adentro, que te desarma mientras lo lees, que te deja viendo tu propia vida reflejada en la suya aunque a simple vista no tengan nada que ver. porque lo que hace mckenzie wark no es solo contar su historia, sino diseccionarse a través de su transición, de sus deseos, de sus relaciones (con personas, con el dinero y el poder). y en ese proceso, al fragmentarse, se vuelve universal.

no hay una narrativa cerrada ni un hilo conductor claro. no hay un mensaje de superación ni una épica de la identidad. lo que hay es una colección de memorias en las que el yo es algo que se construye y se deconstruye constantemente, como un archivo en permanente edición. y ahí está la magia: en esa conciencia de que siempre pudimos haber sido diferentes. en ese juego con la posibilidad, con lo que fue y lo que podría haber sido.

y como decía, en esas preguntas que se hace sobre sí misma, sobre los yoes posibles, sobre lo que significa transicionar (no solo de género, sino de vida, de pensamiento, de afectos), una no puede evitar verse. pero no porque nuestras experiencias sean iguales, sino porque todas habitamos esa grieta entre lo que somos y lo que los demás creen que somos.

y sí, wark es cruda, pero también juguetona. puede lanzar frases como puñetazos ("La transexualidad es el shock de lo posible") y al mismo tiempo burlarse de cualquier intento de definir el género ("Quizás simplemente debería decirles que mi género es Dalek anaranjado"). y en ese ir y venir entre la reflexión filosófica y la anécdota más humana, nos recuerda que el género no es una esencia ni una verdad revelada, sino algo que construimos, editamos y vivimos con la misma arbitrariedad con la que escogemos una prenda o un nombre (aunque sea inconscientemente, vaya).

hay frases que duelen porque nombran cosas que ya sabíamos pero no queríamos ver. "Quiero que veas y sientas a la persona en la que me estoy convirtiendo, pero tengo miedo de dejar de agradarte. O que dejes de quererme". cuántas veces hemos habitado ese miedo, cuánto hemos condicionado nuestra identidad para encajar en los deseos de otro... cuántas veces hemos creído que gustar era una recompensa, hasta que se convirtió en una jaula.

en fin, si algo deja claro este libro es que no hay una única forma de ser ni de pertenecer. "Todxs somos trans. La única diferencia es que nosotras lo sabemos. ¡Llevamos la delantera!". una frase que, lejos de ser un eslogan, se siente como un guiño cómplice. porque al final, ¿qué es ser trans sino aceptar que el yo no es una verdad fija, sino una ficción más adecuada?

cuestión, que si la identidad es una ficción, entonces este libro es su making-of jsjsjs un recorrido sin vergüenza ni culpa por todo lo que una persona ha sido, es y será, contado con la crudeza de quien no tiene miedo de mirarse con honestidad. un libro que, como una fotografía, nos muestra lo que somos a través de lo que hemos sido.

[Germán · Rating 3 out of 5]

"De la casa, propiamente, aprendí una estética. Una libre de excrecencias. Una en la que la forma lo era todo. Donde cualquier cosa que no fuera la forma tenía el objetivo de revelarla." (pág. 31)
*
"Todo matrimonio es un error de reconocimiento. Las cosas realmente se ponen interesantes cuando identificas este hecho. No es que uno llegue a la verdad del otro. Es más bien una cuestión de dejar de lado el primer error de reconocimiento y encontrar otros que puedan reemplazarlo." (págs. 93-94)
*
"Nueva York está repleto de gente como nosotras. La clase dominante necesita que sigamos revelando nuestros pequeños trucos al inventario común de datos. Nuestros extraños cerebros están a la venta. Nos pagan bastante bien por el trabajo de nuestros extraños cerebros. Es así como logramos pagar estos exorbitantes alquileres. Necesitamos estar cerca de otra gente rara. Contorsionándonos, en esta ciudad, o en algunas partes al menos, allí donde la rareza es tan común como la respiración." (pág. 108)

[Josephine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am admittedly a wark fan - I just think the way she writes about relationships and the “transfemme experience” has spoken to me in such profound ways time and time again.

I keep coming back to her letters to her partner, deceased mother, and younger self in awe of the gentleness they show that I wish I can show to others.

“And yet my love for you ran deep, plunged right into the coldness. Nothing about the ways in which it mistook you made it any less true. That’s the hardest part. That love can be absolutely real and yet not recognize itself or that which it loves. It’s the realest thing, and yet it connects lovers who never know either themselves or each other. When love is in crisis, it exposes our unreality to ourselves. I is a nothing.”

Yet another lovely sad gay memoir to add to my treasured stash idk

[KT · Rating 4 out of 5]

A touching and evocative read written as a series of letters from the author to their loved ones and themselves that invoke détournement to great subversive effect

Particular passages of note include:
"I don't want to say too much about you. Here's just one detail I'll share. That you feed the stray cats on your block. That you took them inside during a storm but set them free again. That you want them to live, but to live cat lives."

The colonial mentality underpinning scholarship in which a scholar is supposed to have a "field". Put stakes in it, claim it, "break new ground," defend it as if it was your private property. Then "pave the way" for others to suburbanise yet more.

[lia 🐩 · Rating 3 out of 5]

tal vez no es la mejor escritura y tal vez mckenzie es mamona y en ocasiones ignorante pero este libro es muy honesto y eso me conmovió. son cartas a sí mismo cuando joven, a su mamá, a su hermana, a su esposa, a sus amantes, a una diosa.

“all i can know of you and him as a couple comes from memories of material traces from the life you made together. your books in his built-in shelves”

“i hope at least they will know, with mammalian certainty, that they were loved”

“i want more than anything to open my scarred heart to you”

“all i can say is: i feel my own pain when you speak of yours”

[Noanodium · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book took me a long time to read because I cried every time I sat down to read it. I am in awe at McKenzies ability to write so honestly and sensitively and convey her personal experiences all the while painting a bigger picture of systemic violence. I loved the beautiful prose in this book as well as the occasional philosophical tangents. Wark's is a mind I love to submerge myself in through her writing. I have had this book borrowed and so could annotate it but I absolutely intend to return to this text with a pencil in hand.

[Gavin Kierulf · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is felt as much as its read. It's the feeling of listening in on muffled conversations through a door, or around you on the subway ... hearing glimpses of the most intimate. So intimate it feels like its really for your ears only.

Deeply moving, deeply vulnerable.

"... the political is personal. What fight is left in me is for a world where we all sit together at thanksgiving – all those we love, and spare a seat as well for whoever needs it." (p. 76)

[Bella Moses · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 thoroughly engaging, though not my favorite of her works I’ve read so far. Something about Wark’s prose is so destabilizing to me (in a good way!) but there were some moments here that felt just a little too run of the mill liberal. Always love her thoughts on raving tho.

[Emilia Eräpolku · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

Loved reading this in its entirety. Could include here so many great, insightful quotes from her but I’ll just add this one: “The good life will be when everyone can live with and from what makes us different.” (P.147) 🥹🫶🏻

[Nagore Sanchez · Rating 5 out of 5]

"egin dezakedan onena gutun hauek idaztea da, iragan galdua paperez estaltzeko". ze gorra baño ze beharrezkua liburu hau. zenbat eskertzeko mckenzieri hau dana hain modu zintzo ta zaurgarriyan plazaratziatik, bere hausnarketengatik ta bere jakituria munduakin partekatziatik. <3

[Darío Blanco Gómez de Barreda · Rating 5 out of 5]

No he sido muy fan de la traducción al español y hubiese preferido que fuese también de Mariano López Seoane, pero es un librazo y el perfecto complemento para Faltas de Cecilia Gentili y Vaquera invertida, también de McKenzie.

[Laura Sackton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this. Letters are such an intimate way to write a memoir.

[Riley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely beautiful memoir, Very reminiscent of Cecilia Gentili’s “Faltas,” veering between sentimental portraits of Wark’s relationship to her sister and mother and reflections on her transition.

[K · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sweet! Smart.

[ronan · Rating 5 out of 5]

⭐️ 4.5

‘i is an-other’

[Paulina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Conecté solo con algunos relatos. Creo que el formato es un poco repetitivo, ella también.

[Gigi Gata · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just loved it and enjoyed it...

[Lyanne Wang · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mothers section was fantastic, the rest trailed off for me.

[Diego Maltz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inteligente, profundo, bien escrito

[Michaela Y-M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Autotheory, memoir, creative non-fiction; genre traversal in all the best ways. I will read this book again immediately!