The Argonauts
2015
- motherhood
- sexual minorities' families
- family
- pregnancy
- transgender parents
- gay parents
- sexual minorities
- poets, biography
- transgender people
- nyt:culture=2015-06-07
The story
Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of “autotheory” offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author’s relationship with artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes the author’s account of falling in love with Dodge, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, is an intimate portrayal of the complexities and joys of (queer) family making. Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals like Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and childrearing. Nelson’s insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.
What it’s like
Dense but conversational first-person prose, broken into numbered fragments that circle through quotations, theory and kitchen-table domestic detail, so the reading feels like thinking aloud in a warm, book-lined apartment during a pregnancy. The sensory world is interior and close: the hum of late-night thoughts, the texture of a body changing, the everyday light of a Los Angeles home rendered in small precise observations rather than landscape. Its vibe is tender, intellectual and candid, with a quiet urgency under the humour, the kind of book to read slowly with a pen nearby on a rainy Sunday or in a long, unhurried stretch alone. Pacing is meditative and nonlinear, with short sections that loop back on themselves, and the emotional register moves between erotic intensity, anxiety and wry affection. The arc follows two people learning to make a family on their own terms, and a self loosening its old certainties. Sex is frank and explicit in places, and there is grief and some medical discomfort, but no violence and little threat, so it reads as bracing rather than harrowing. Written for readers who want honest, theory-literate intimacy about love, bodies and what family can mean.
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