Books
Vivian Blaxell
Worthy of the Event
Exhume Harold Bloom. “My vagina disappoints me” should be cited among the great hooks of the Western canon.
This sly line, which opens the first essay in Vivian Blaxell’s Worthy of the Event, is a riposte to looky-loos anticipating a “Trans Memoir”, whose formulaic arc Blaxell wearily summarises later on: “troubled 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 détente”. In other words: “All that lovely old transsexual shit.”
These snippets show how élan vital radiates from Blaxell’s 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’s “neovagina”, which she has possessed for several decades now, is not the main event.
On the page, Blaxell’s narrative “I” exudes 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 – which Blaxell examines explicitly in her final essay – 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.
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’s afterlives, the human condition and much more besides. In all honesty, the essays can get kinda longwinded, but Blaxell’s voice is so marvellous it’s immaterial.
Take the concluding chapter, “the practice”, which is precipitated by an ex’s 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’s “quite flawless” bottom on her deathbed – an image of eternal recurrence at once candid and transcendent.
The event of the book’s title is both life and its inescapable denouement. “When my own black star shows up for me,” Blaxell writes, “I will be worthy of it.”
LittlePuss Press, 296pp, $34.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 19, 2025 as "Worthy of the Event".
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