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

An ABA Indie Next Pick - A San Francisco Chronicle Women’s History Month Book Pick - An Allstora Queer History 101 Book Club Pick

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.

Vivian Blaxell has written and published short stories, scholarly essays, personal essays, and reportage in a variety of publications. ’Nuclear Cats’ was shortlisted for the 2021 Melbourne Prize for Literature. Vivian grew up in rural Australia and is a former street kid, teenage sex worker, ecdysiast, manager of an astrological employment agency, managing director of an international wellness organization, consultant on cross-border and cross-cultural operations, and registered mental health nurse. She has held lectureships and professorial positions in Japanese history and politics, and in political philosophy, in the United States, Australia, Japan, Turkey, and China. She co-founded Tiresias House, Australia’s first shelter and resource centre for and by trans people. She lives in Naarm/Melbourne. Worthy of the Event is Vivian’s first published book.