Worthy of the Event: An Essay

A trans essayist with a checkered past takes on the big questions of human existence

Move over Michel de Montaigne, there's a new girl in town

Set against a backdrop of trans life that begins with her own transition in the 1960s, Vivian Blaxell takes us on a witty and expansive sweep through history, from Australia to Japan, to Hawai'i to Mexico, to heretofore unmapped regions of the mind. In seven devastatingly intelligent parts, her essay covers a vast range in time and space - from the arson of a Japanese temple to a transformative encounter with a coral reef, from Nietzsche and Hegel to Indigenous metaphysics, from a perplexing relationship with a beautiful man to the unknowable minds of animals. Fleshy and philosophical, searching and exalted, utterly distinctive and assured, Worthy of the Event belatedly establishes Vivian Blaxell as one of the major writers of her generation.

"It takes a lot to impress a jaded old soul like me. But reading Vivian Blaxell I think: Wow! Worthy of the Event tracks the multi-dimensionality of consciousness as the author moves through gendered spheres of pleasure, strife, disappointment, hilarity. Always at the core of her personal is an empathetic participation in the plights of all species. Blaxell's blunt, elegant sentences are thoroughly modern, yet they exude a depth that speaks to previous centuries. I see her as a sort of 21st century Proust committed to TMI. "My vagina is not a good judge of character." This is what writing should look like. This is what writing should do."
--Dodie Bellamy, author of Bee-Reaved

"Singular in voice and tone."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"Intelligent, intuitive ... brilliant ... [Blaxell] expansively deliberates on modern colonialism, the notion of "God," and even excrement to make way for meditations on the challenges and difficulties of gender transition."
--Kirkus

"As trans people, we know the spaces that open up to us when we decide to live in the world on our own terms. Blaxell's essays bring us her invaluable and deeply generous thinking on how we become worthy of the life and the world that she clearly loves so much."
--Ren Dean, Skunk Cabbage Books (Chicago, IL)

"This is an astonishing book--a complete, byzantine personality revealed by degrees in a whirlwind of associations, from the metaphysics of transubstantiation to the terminal shit.Worthy of the Event is a living thing, seductive and hypnotic, borne aloft by its rolling cadences."
--Lucy Sante, author of I Heard Her Call My Name and Low Life

"Worthy of the Event vibrates with becoming, a moving (not so) random walk into a life richly, bitchily lived, beauty and/in its disappearance, philosophy and literature, trans theory and theorists, variegated transphobias, fucking, empires colonial and nuclear, sex work, the joy of thinking and her disappointments, love. The most provoking writing I've read in so long, all that old transsexual shit, tremulously there and gone, a text blissfully here to go back to."
--Trish Salah, Lambda Award-winning author of Wanting In Arabic

"Vivian Blaxell takes the events of her life and gives them a new event--this book. An extraordinary book for an extraordinary life. A book that's curious, expansive, erudite, generous, shapely. A book that gives the reader the enormous gift of knowing that we can all become worthy of what knocks the life into us."
--McKenzie Wark, author of Love and Money, Sex and Death

"As bewitching as it is paradoxical: poetic and prickly, intimate and distant, singular and polyphonic. I adore how [Blaxell] tangles with topics, creating sharp and delicious connections across time and space, weaving details from her uncompromising life to create an intricate, organic, and alluring work that feels like a web, a nest, and a haute couture dress. This is a pulsing banger of a book."
--Hazel Jane Plante, author of Any Other City

"In her seventies, Vivian Blaxell looks at life through the lens of transness, and transness through the lens of life...like that of her patron saint Gertrude Stein, Blaxell's prose is intimate, candid, bold, and erudite...She takes us on joy rides that break the speed limit, run red lights, swerve between lanes, detour through worm holes, and by the time she's done sirens are going off everywhere."
--Diana Goetsch, author of This Body I Wore: A Memoir

"An expertly crafted and stunning piece of art. Blaxell's philosophical knowledge is boundless but, as no such expert myself, I felt comfortable in her hands; I guess all I needed to get Nietzsche was to have a much cooler transsexual explain it to me. This book will change your life."
--Charlie Jones, A Room of One's Own (Madison, WI)

"An incredible piece of writing; the cover is actually a picture of my brain while reading this book--swirling, expanding, exploding."
--Frederick Rossero, Oblong Books (Millerton, NY)

"An electric, surprising, and revelatory use of the memoiristic essay form. Blaxell's passion for Life lifts off every page: by which I mean Life Itself, not just her own. Her pursuit of life in all places and times and her ever-hauntedness by the legacies of imperialism are integral to her work. Becoming, far more than being, is where Blaxell points, and I, for one, very much want to travel that way with her."
--Elisabeth Plumlee-Watson, Loganberry Books (Shaker Heights, OH)

"How do we become who we are is an old question, but I don't know if I've ever seen someone punch it as hard as Blaxell does. She wanders, she rants, she gossips, she wonders, she asks, she does not relent and ultimately she reveals that no question is easy when you actually give a fuck about the answer."
--Josh Cook, Porter Square Books (Cambridge, MA)

"Enticing."
--Mikayla Bryant, Books Are Magic (Brooklyn, NY)

"Brings a magpie eclecticism to the metaphysics of transition in this brisk and dry-witted inquiry. Anecdotes, fixations, even her bones to pick animate the theoretical."
--Alice Stoehr, Irreverent Bookworm (Minneapolis, MN)

"Like any good essay, it has a lovely branching and diverging form--as does the life it documents...This is a book about how to be worthy of what happens to us, how not to be disappointed with life, to embrace wanting what we want."
--e-flux

Vivian Blaxell grew up in rural Australia and co-founded Tiresias House, Australia's first shelter and resource centre for and by trans people. Her essay "Nuclear Cats" was shortlisted for the 2021 Melbourne Prize for Literature. She lives in Naarm/Melbourne, VIC, Australia.

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