Join us in welcoming McKenzie Wark to celebrate the release of LOVE AND MONEY, SEX AND DEATH. For this event, Wark will be joined in conversation by Annie Howard.

Please note: Pre-registration for this event is required. By pre-registering, you are verifying that you are fully vaccinated and will wear a mask throughout the entirety of the event.

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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.

McKenzie Wark is the author of A Hacker Manifesto, The Beach beneath the Street, The Spectacle of Disintegration, Molecular Red, Capital Is Dead, as well as the popular introductions to contemporary thought General Intellects and Sensoria. In 2017, she came out as transgender. Since, she has published her trans autofiction books, Reverse Cowgirl and Raving, and a work that combines memoir and literary criticism about Kathy Acker, Philosophy for Spiders. She teaches at Eugene Lang College, the New School.

Annie Howard is a journalist, historian, urbanist and organizer currently living in Bridgeport. Her written work has appeared in the Chicago Reader, the Guardian, the Baffler, Slate, Pitchfork, The Nation, and elsewhere. Annie works as a housing organizer, and is currently fighting to pass the Just Cause for Eviction ordinance in Chicago’s City Council. You can also catch her radio show City Dreams on Lumpen Radio every first and third Wednesday at 10 am.

Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com by no later than 14 days before the event. For other questions or access needs, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com.

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Tags: Chicago, Edgewater, LOVE AND MONEY SEX AND DEATH, McKenzie Wark, Women & Children First Bookstore