Both and Neither (A Memoir and History of Gender (Or, A Haunting))

Author of The Fact of a Body, and winner of this year’s Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich considers how we bear witness to trans lives, past and present.

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.