Love and Money, Sex and Death: A Memoir

After a successful career, a twenty-year marriage, and raising two kids, McKenzie Wark has a particularly extreme midlife life-change: 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.