LOVE AND MONEY, SEX AND DEATH
A Memoir
by McKenzie Wark
Verso Press. 176 pages, $24.95
I WAS INTRODUCED to the work of McKenzie Wark in 2021, with her book Philosophy for Spiders. This book is part memoir and part literary criticism of Kathy Acker, Wark’s friend and lover. I appreciated their candid conversations about solitude and sexual desire, masturbation, and what pronouns to use for Acker’s dildo collection. Both saw experimentation, specifically through language, as something equally present on the page and on the body.
Acker and Wark met in 1995 and continued emailing back and forth for over a year, the result of which was collected in I’m Very Into You, published in 2015, eighteen years after Acker’s death. The emails are sporadic and passionate. They range from cultural commentary to discussions of sex and gender play, each message a window into the ways we receive and appreciate intimacy, and the ways we notice those we adore, even (especially) when they’re not physically with us.
Wark’s latest memoir, Love and Money, Sex and Death, returns to letter-writing as a way of revisiting past lovers and past friends, and those who fall somewhere in between. She 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: “Changing sex edits your relation to a lot of things. Including history.”
Growing up in Newcastle, Australia, Wark was heavily influenced by poststructural theory and became interested in the ways that language—written, spoken, or performed—is used to establish difference and build identity. She published Virtual Geography in 1994, one of her first theoretical works, which looked at the relationship between physicality, or embodied experiences, and digital spaces. Phones, computers, and TVs all become part of our “virtual geographies,” dictating how we move through time, present and future. Her more recent works explore these questions through personal experience. Her 2020 genre-bending memoir Reverse Cowgirl weaves queer theory into personal experiences of stumbling into and out of gender identities, of searching for language for growing up trans and not knowing it yet, or recognizing it without language to claim it.
In the preface of Love and Money, Sex and Death, Wark writes to her childhood self: “You—what do I even remember of you? Our past selves are probably extensively edited editions.” The relationship between writing and the body is something Wark frequently interrogates, using revision to illustrate the ways a body is similarly edited, revisited, and experienced. In Philosophy for Spiders, she writes: “Language has digital bits that bodies don’t.” Language gives the body more flexibility, more permission to transform, change, see itself outside of a linear narrative. Wark argues that one can revise, edit, and reintroduce the body to the present by revisiting memories of another life. The use of second person demonstrates this reflection as a kind of forced separation between her past and present selves.
The work is divided into three main sections—“Mothers,” “Lovers,” and “Others”—in which Wark writes to people like her own mother, Joyce, who died when she was five, and Cybele, the Phrygian goddess of trans women (to put it in modern terms). The letters range from comical anecdotes to questions about the past that were left unexplored. These questions infiltrate memory, confronting changes in patterns of thought from past relationships, though not necessarily toward reconciliation.
Among many of the selves that Wark revisits is that of professor, where she writes to one of her students who passed away, a Black trans woman named Venus. “[Your death], Venus, came from the violence of marginal labor, from the order of the straight family, from anti-Blackness,” Wark writes. “Nothing will ever extort a reconciliation from me to any of that.” While much of Wark’s memoir details challenges she has faced as a trans woman, her letter to Venus acknowledges the privilege within her lament. The epistolary form allows Wark to revisit a time in her past in a way by paying attention to those around her. Attention serves as a form of love, an acknowledgement of a life outside oneself.
She explores what reconciliation means within the confines of love and sex, death and money. This gesture is broad, but its wide scope redefines reconciliation to be something less permanent. Wark focuses on adjustment, and the act of revisitation becomes a sort of homemade remedy that might not heal an injury, but, at the very least, acknowledges its pain.
There is an honesty in these letters that evokes a kind of self-awareness existing in the body and in the text. In “To Veronica,” Wark mentions a conversation she had over lunch with a friend, also trans, about the ways trans people are seen by each other and by cis strangers, weaving together personal experience and theory to support her claims, naming Nietzsche and Plato, among others. To avoid the subject of sleeping with Veronica’s ex, she talks about gender theory: “I was hoping to distract you from that. Alright, so I fucked your ex and didn’t tell you. These things happen, hun.”
The title’s themes of love, money, sex, and death are somewhat explored, though at times they remain only tangentially related. Perhaps it is this vagueness that gives Wark’s new memoir a certain elasticity. By inscribing her present self onto her past through a return to memory, she achieves her goal “to shock flesh into awareness,” to bring her body into different periods of time. In that respect, Wark sees letter writing as a way of recovering the past, but also making space for what was left out of the original story. In recounting various experiences, she reveals a kind of love that isn’t explicit, but nevertheless remains important: it is an attention that validates experience, making space for change, or, as Wark might say, a new edit.
