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.

"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

"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." - 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." - 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." - Nylon

"[Love and Money, Sex and Death] outright embodies not just the communal, but the femmunal, the sprawling network of weirdo-others that make the self." - Guernica

"Wark's work is always worth checking out, and this new book looks to be an especially essential part of her bibliography." - Vol. 1 Brooklyn

"Wark's poetic and direct language crafts an unusually moving text that draws on art, popular culture, and mythology. The result is an introspective narrative that both tells an individual's story and conveys essential insights into gender and queerness, family, friends, and change." - Hyperallergic

"In glimpses that are both emotionally and intellectually breathtaking, [Wark] recalls her coming-of-age in Newcastle, Australia, in the 1960s and '70s; her career as a poet; her marriage and grief; parenthood; her various lovers and her transition, in her 50s." - The New York Times Book Review

"[Wark] turns the idea of a traditional, linear memoir on its head, using hindsight as a tool to reapproach, and in some cases recover, past relationships." - The Gay & Lesbian Review

"McKenzie Wark is one of the sharpest, most exciting voices writing at the intersections of capitalism, community, gender, and sex - more broadly, everything in this title - and she is also criminally underread." - Vulture

"Ricochets between sparkling defiance, unravelled grief, and furious hope. It's a fun, wild, devastating ride. Read it." - The Conversation