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Purchase this book
\n Worthy of the Event<\/p>\n
Exhume Harold Bloom. \u201cMy vagina disappoints me\u201d should be cited among the great hooks of the Western canon.<\/p>\n
This sly line, which opens the first essay in Vivian Blaxell\u2019s Worthy of the Event, is a riposte to looky-loos anticipating a \u201cTrans Memoir\u201d, whose formulaic arc Blaxell wearily summarises later on: \u201ctroubled child, realization that there is female inside the male body, a bad case of gender dysphoria, much suffering, coming out, gender transition, oh joy!, more suffering, then some sort of d\u00e9tente\u201d. In other words: \u201cAll that lovely old transsexual shit.\u201d<\/p>\n
These snippets show how \u00e9lan vital radiates from Blaxell\u2019s prose. Across her spiralling essays the reader pieces together that their interlocutor, whose debut collection is being published in her mid-70s, has inhabited a feline spectrum of lives. Born into a Seventh Day Adventist nuclear family in Wagga Wagga, Blaxell remakes herself as a sex worker, nurse, activist, academic (political philosophy and Japanese history) and wife (three times over), her wide-ranging career and romantic escapades seeing her reside all over the world. Blaxell\u2019s \u201cneovagina\u201d, which she has possessed for several decades now, is\u00a0not the main event.<\/p>\n
On the page, Blaxell\u2019s narrative \u201cI\u201d\u00a0exudes streetwise sagacity. Her voice is by turns gossipy, frank, erudite, wry, philosophical, playful. Flaunting the influence of New Narrative writers such as Dodie Bellamy and Eileen Myles \u2013 which Blaxell examines explicitly in her final essay \u2013 there is a propulsive ongoingness to her sentences, stockpiling clauses in an infectious style that is thrilling, vertiginous, teetering on the brink of too-much-ness, dense with poetry and ideas.<\/p>\n
These seven essays explore subjects of disappointment, becoming, animality, beauty, disaster, infinity and emulation. Such blunt precis belie their ecstatic associations, which often circle back to intellectual preoccupations with spirituality, the corporeal, friendship, Japan, empire\u2019s afterlives, the human condition and much more besides. In all honesty, the essays can get kinda longwinded, but Blaxell\u2019s voice is so marvellous it\u2019s immaterial.<\/p>\n
Take the concluding chapter, \u201cthe practice\u201d, which is precipitated by an ex\u2019s accusation of unoriginality, then detours through literary imitation, methods and inspirations; shit; the essay form; and the experience of tending to her 93-year-old mother\u2019s \u201cquite flawless\u201d bottom on her deathbed \u2013 an image of eternal recurrence at\u00a0once candid and transcendent.<\/p>\n
The event of the book\u2019s title is both life and its inescapable denouement. \u201cWhen my own black star shows up for me,\u201d Blaxell writes, \u201cI will be worthy of it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
LittlePuss Press, 296pp, $34.99<\/p>\n
\n This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
\n July 19, 2025 as “Worthy of the Event”.<\/p>\n
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\n Worthy of the Event<\/p>\n
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