The Argonauts
A memoir of love, pregnancy and gender with Winnicott quoted in the margin throughout.
On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness.
Nelson writes across autobiography and theory at once, setting an account of falling in love with the artist Harry Dodge, of pregnancy, and of a family assembled through gender transition beside the words of the thinkers she reads. Passages from Winnicott, Barthes, Sedgwick and others are set beside her own sentences, their authors named as she goes, so that reading and living stay in one frame.
For a clinician the interest is in method. Nelson takes Winnicott's good-enough mother, his account of holding and ordinary devotion, and holds each idea against the daily labour of care rather than restating it. Theory is neither illustrated nor dismissed; it is put under the pressure of a particular body, a particular household, and asked whether it still describes anything.
The result reads as a record of concepts being used, not admired. Categories of gender, family and desire keep shifting as she works, and the writing follows that motion instead of resolving it.
About the author
Maggie Nelson
Maggie Nelson (born 1973) is an American writer whose work moves freely across poetry, criticism, and memoir. She often blends personal experience with cultural and philosophical inquiry, refusing tidy boundaries between forms. In 2016 she received a MacArthur Fellowship. She is widely read for The Argonauts, an account of family and identity, along with Bluets and The Art of Cruelty. Her books have found a broad readership among writers and general readers alike.
Details
- 2015
- Graywolf Press
- Graywolf Press