Both and Neither
A Memoir and History of Gender (Or, a Haunting)
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Both and Neither
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Narrated by:
In Both and Neither, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich weaves memoir and history into a singular work shaped by the figures who have long haunted them. Moving across centuries, they trace lives that have made and unmade gender in the public imagination, revealing how the past persists—intimately, insistently—within the present.
Through meticulous research and vivid storytelling, Marzano-Lesnevich uncovers a constellation of historical figures: Joseph Lobdell, a nineteenth-century trans man institutionalized for loving a woman; Gerd Katter, a carpenter and early patient at Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science in the 1920s; Pauli Murray, the visionary thinker whose ideas anticipated feminist and civil rights movements decades ahead of their time; and Claude Cahun, whose radical art and self-fashioning defied gender norms throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
As history unfolds, memoir bleeds into the archive. Marzano-Lesnevich turns a clear-eyed gaze on their own life and loves, reflecting on past romantic relationships. The rapture and pain of intimacy course through their story, binding personal experience to historical inquiry as the author traces their own becoming alongside those who came before.
Vital, timely, and beautifully executed, Both and Neither fuses maverick scholarship with profound emotional intelligence to recover a history long obscured. In doing so, Marzano-Lesnevich confirms their place as one of the most ambitious and original writers working today.
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Critic reviews
"Both and Neither is groundbreaking, nothing short of extraordinary: a vital exploration of trans experience across past and present. Blending rigorous historical research with deeply personal memoir, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich brings to light four trans forebears long obscured by history—and reveals the paths their lives have opened for generations to come."
—Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Our Missing Hearts
“An irresistible adventure...a story of intimacy, capturing its vision of trans and nonbinary becoming with necessity and nerve, creating thresholds, through multiple narratives, into worlds still unseen...a major achievement, a work that will outlast us."
—Paul Lisicky, author of Song So Wild and Blue and Later: My Life at the Edge of the World
“A thrilling masterwork that braids stories of transmasculine individuals with Marzano-Lesnevich’s own complicated and fascinating journey through gender. I read it in a rush, the emotional stakes so high and each history so gripping. BOTH AND NEITHER feels like a book we couldn’t have had before, and yet long needed. Marzano-Lesnevich has a precise, deeply attentive writer’s eye, investing each story with tenderness, nuance and pain. They are the only person who could’ve written it.”
—Lydi Conklin, author of Songs of No Provenance
—Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Our Missing Hearts
“An irresistible adventure...a story of intimacy, capturing its vision of trans and nonbinary becoming with necessity and nerve, creating thresholds, through multiple narratives, into worlds still unseen...a major achievement, a work that will outlast us."
—Paul Lisicky, author of Song So Wild and Blue and Later: My Life at the Edge of the World
“A thrilling masterwork that braids stories of transmasculine individuals with Marzano-Lesnevich’s own complicated and fascinating journey through gender. I read it in a rush, the emotional stakes so high and each history so gripping. BOTH AND NEITHER feels like a book we couldn’t have had before, and yet long needed. Marzano-Lesnevich has a precise, deeply attentive writer’s eye, investing each story with tenderness, nuance and pain. They are the only person who could’ve written it.”
—Lydi Conklin, author of Songs of No Provenance
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