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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.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 26, 2023 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781804292631
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781804292631
- File size: 2161 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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July 1, 2023
In a series of letters, a transgender woman reflects on her life before and after transitioning. While in high school--when she was still passing as male--Wark, author of Reverse Cowgirland Sensoria, among many other books, had a female alter ego named Karen, a name she adopted from a "popular" classmate who, after an equestrian accident, ended up in a coma. The author is now grateful that she didn't take on the name, both because of this history and the modern association of Karenwith problematic white women. She expresses her gratitude in a letter to Venus, a Black trans woman who the author explains is an amalgamation of "two young transpeople I have known and lost and still grieve." The other letters in the book--addressed to recipients as diverse as Wark's past self, older sister, ex-wife, and the goddess Cybele ("As an atheist, I might live without you, but somehow, you're still there")--trace the author's personal and political history as a trans woman who didn't fully realize her gender identity until well into adulthood. In addition to exploring her identity as a "T4T" who takes estrogen but doesn't try to pass as a woman, Wark examines her relationship with her disability (she had surgery to correct her clubbed feet) and expresses joy and gratitude toward those who have shaped the body and life she now inhabits. At times, the author's treatment of race can be clumsy. In one chapter, she describes her "problematic" objectification of a Black male stranger and then includes a picture of this stranger several pages later without clarifying whether the photograph was taken or included in the book with consent. However, Wark's analysis of gender, sexuality, and queerness is both ebullient and trenchant, and her compassionate introspection is mostly a pleasure to read. A sharp epistolary memoir about gender, family, disability, and age.COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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