Will I love The Argonauts?

This is an incredibly intimate and thought-provoking book that marries the story of the author’s relationship and pregnancy with her partner, along with history, philosophy, and even critical theory. What makes the book so fascinating is how quickly she’s able to shift between these different modes of writing.

So, one minute, she’s talking about being a parent, and in the next paragraph, she’s revisiting how the philosophical approach to child-rearing evolved over the 20th century. It really shook me out of thinking a memoir had to be approached one way or be just one thing. 

Maggie Nelson just dazzles me. Her prose is so sharp and thoughtful, her thinking so idiosyncratically brilliant, her images filled with light. The Argonauts is both memoir and inquiry, a story of how Nelson and her partner Harry, who is in the midst of a gender transition, became parents, a story fraught with obstacles and veined with wisdom. Nelson’s voice mixes erudition, visceral power—especially when she writes about sex and the body—and formal innovation. The Argonauts caused a splash when it came out, and for good reason—its unflinchingly honest portrayal of one queer couple’s creation of family together is beautiful,… show more.

Described as a “genre-bending memoir,” The Argonauts is a beautiful, life-affirming meditation on the nature of desire, intimacy, self-identity, love, and the way in which our inevitable blind spots make the confronting of these themes fraught with confusion and contradiction. Nelson allows us to be a fly on the wall of her mind as she works through her concerns in a stream-of-consciousness manner. The New Yorker called The Argonauts, “An exceptional portrait… of the collaboration between Nelson’s mind and heart.” Indeed, The Argonauts is a much-needed reminder for us (both as writers and as human beings) not to shy… show more.

Few writers manage to blend theory and narrative like Maggie Nelson, let alone make the combination sing. In this book of ‘autotheory’ she writes about desire, the body, identity, transformation, the queerness of pregnancy, the formation of her queer family, and the relationship of freedom to caretaking. Follow her beautiful mind through this book that will never be called memoir, but which should change your mind, nevertheless, as to what memoir can do. 

I love how intellectually and emotionally daring this book is, how fearless and willing to challenge conventional notions. Maggie Nelson writes beautifully and honestly about sex and sexuality, queerness, desire, language, and the meaning of family, pregnancy, and motherhood. I am inspired by the way she blends the intensely personal with the philosophical and with critical inquiry.