Worthy of the Event: An Essay

A trans essayist with a chequered 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.

"At a time where trans rights and bodily autonomy are under threat, it's voices like Vivian's which we need to platform and listen to." - Soaliha Iqbal, Missing Perspectives

Worthy of the Event will strike you as the work of a lifetime." - Elese Dowden, Overland

"These essays span years; the book seems to contain a whole library of experience." - Torrey Peters, author of Stag Dance and Detransition Baby

"Blaxell's sentences buck and slither, even as they feel like talking, like taking a walk. It's kinetic; it's intimate too." - Agnes Borinsky, LA Review of Books

"An illuminating and unique addition to the essay form. Worthy of the Event is unabashedly poetic and lyrical in its tender descriptions of the worst and best things in Blaxell's life of up-and-down multitudes, while maintaining the exacting analysis of an essay by a philosophical academic." - Honi Soit

"There is a propulsive ongoingness to [Blaxell's] sentences, stockpiling clauses in an infectious style that is thrilling, vertiginous, teetering on the brink of too-much-ness, dense with poetry and ideas." - Rebecca Harkins-Cross, The Saturday Paper

"Seldom have trans women allowed themselves the montage-cut intellect claimed so readily by the prime literary flâneurs; trans womanhood has signified too much body, too much history, too much too-much, to be so fleet-footed. Blaxell writes close to the transgender body, but shows that this is never in tension with truly existential and world-historical scope." - Amelia C. Winter, Meanjin