Here's what I liked: I liked the way Nelson writes about motherhood. Honest, unashamed, full of a joy with a hugeness to it. I've read some great writing on motherhood published recently (see: Eula Biss' On Immunity) and I deeply appreciate this work, as someone for whom the desire to birth and parent a child is very alien. I have been at times a little bratty in my attitudes towards those who chose to parent, so work that is critical of that attitude and helps demystify parenting feels invaluab...

To absolutely no one's surprise, Maggie Nelson has delivered yet another exceptional and essential book. It's a middle finger to identity politics, a desperate call to re-evaluate that which we understand as "radical," and an incredibly moving memoir about motherhood, navigating queerness, and partnership. Of course, it's also a million other things, too.

“You pass as a guy; I, as pregnant. Our waiter cheerfully tells us about his family, expresses delight in ours. On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more “male,” mine, more and more “female.” But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.”This book explores Maggie Nelson's relationship with Harry Dodge, who is f...

this book cracked me open like a walnut. One of those messy walnuts where the nut ends up shattered to pieces in your hand. While reading I was frequently on a vertiginous edge close to weeping, not really from any feeling with a name, just from all the feeling that was going on as I read. Part of it was a feeling of recognition. A feeling that comes from having a very long conversation with someone who expresses what you thought were your most private thoughts, who puts into words what didn't h...

Um. 'The Argonauts' is about gender, pregnancy, and other things. The name 'Argonaut' is borrowed from a book passage in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. It refers to a boat, and the answer is if you replace every particle of the boat, it is still the same boat called Argonaut, and how that compares to saying "I love you" to a person, renewing the meaning by each use, "the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new." The author

In sum, this book was written by a white woman in a long term stable relationship with a white ftm and therefore male partner, in a two parent, mom and dad household with two children, who is made very happy by this domestic arrangement, but since this makes her appear, essentially, the most heteronormative white woman ever, she felt the need to write a booklength blog entry about how out there and special and cutting edge and sexually perverted she really is, for really reals!Give me a fucking

Many GR friends have written incredibly thoughtful reviews of this book. I wanted to love it. I liked it a lot. (I love that it was a bestseller and that many people have read it. Progress!) Nelson is a beautiful writer. The Argonauts is a mosaic of theory, self-examination, and an investigation on the limits of language, the possibilities of love, and the uncompromising belief in fluidity in identity, gender, family. "An endless becoming" is a repeated motif, and the overarching metaphor of the...

Reading The Argonauts was a disorienting experience. Here is a narrator who repeatedly uses an intellectual framework that draws from my own interests in literary and critical theory, whose politics, outwardly at least, largely align with my own, and yet whom I found utterly, poisonously repellent."Ah yes, I think, digging a knee into the podium. Leave it to the old patrician white guy to call the lady speaker back to her body, so that no one misses the spectacle of that wild oxymoron, the pregn...

Really sharp, lovely synthesis of emotional memoir and critical theory, reminiscent of a more outrageous version of Barthes and formatted in a canny way that allows your eyes to fly down the page even as you're taking in some relatively heavy-hitting quotations. The overall theme of the Argo as a metaphor for a relationship (parts keep on changing, but the boat's identity remains the same) is brilliant and her self-described queer relationship with Harry Dodge is depicted movingly. There's one s...

My full review, as well as my other thoughts on reading, can be found on my blog.Mixing memoir and cultural history, Nelson uproots conventional notions of genre and form in The Argonauts, supplanting them with her radical interest in creating art without a center. The short book quickly branches off from the writer's initial focus on her romance with her life partner, trans artist Harry Dodge, and it sprawls in many different directions. Nelson touches upon the ethics of feminist art; the diffi...

(4.5) The opening paragraph is so sexually explicit that I nearly dropped the book (this is something I’ve struggled with in Nelson’s other books too). Thank goodness I kept going, as this is an exquisite interrogation of gender identity and an invaluable reminder that the supposed complications of making a queer family just boil down to your basic human experiences of birth, love and death.Like Bluets, this is often composed of disparate paragraphs and quotations from cultural theorists. I defi...

My expectations for this were very high, perhaps unrealistically so, and I couldn't help being a little disappointed, though the book is well worth reading. My problems perhaps stemmed from my lack of interest in academic writing - for me Nelson's account would have been stronger had she stuck to the personal rather than adding all the cultural and political baggage - but I suspect I am far from her intended audience!Since this book is widely loved, I'll leave the detailed discussion for those w...

this is the opening paragraph of the book:October, 2007. The Santa Ana winds are shredding the bark off the eucalyptus trees in long white stripes. A friend and I risk the widowmakers by having lunch outside, during which she suggests I tattoo the words HARD TO GET across my knuckles, as a reminder of this pose’s possible fruits. Instead the words I love you come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the cement floor of your dan...

This is in no way an easy read. It requires a lot of concentration and brain power. I often felt like I wasn’t understanding much at all. However at the same time I found it uniquely fascinating, particularly it’s honesty. Which means it’s hard for me to rate but I decided on 3 stars.

When I was in my early twenties and just out of school, I was lucky enough to get a job as a production/copy editor for a smallish academic press. My women's studies minor was enough to get me put in charge of the women's studies and LGBT studies offerings, and over the years I copyedited probably thousands of journal articles and book manuscripts on these topics. It was a wonderful education in many ways. At the time, marriage for same-sex couples was a distant dream, and I was a witness, in th...

3.5 starsSerious props to Maggie Nelson for breaking free from the binaries that plague contemporary life. Female vs. male, gay vs. straight, assimiliationist vs. revolutionary - Nelson deconstructs all of these restrictive categories and argues for a richer, more nuanced way of being. My favorite part of The Argonauts centers on how Nelson describes love as an evolving process, one that we must renew and revitalize every single day. In addition to discussing theory, she incorporates details fro...

The Argonauts opens with Maggie Nelson getting fucked in the ass and thinking about Wittgenstein, and I was like, whoa whoa whoa – you can't write about this stuff in a world where The Surrender by Toni Bentley already exists. Trying to write another book about anal sex and its implications for European philosophy would be futile – like trying to write another novel about a day in the life of Dublin.This isn't that kind of book, it turns out. Opening paragraph aside – and despite the surprisingl...

I picked this book up because Carrie Brownstein mentioned reading and loving it in the Q&A to her most recent audiobook, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl. It is hard to explain what this book is but I will try - it is simultaneously an academic exploration of current (and seminal) works on gender, identity, love, dependence; written in a way where sources are listed by author names along the margins of the pages and the direct quotations are only indicated with italics (although sometimes she uses

‘’You’ve punctured my solitude, I told you.’’I feel as if I’m treading on thin ice with this one, because in all honesty, this is a book that one has to read in order to understand. I feel that Nelson has exposed her soul to us, sharing thoughts and experiences that many of us would find unlikely to confess even to ourselves. How can we, as simple readers who haven’t even experienced 10% of what she has been through, write a text saying ‘’this is good’’ or ‘’this is bad’’? Speaking for myself,

This is my fourth book by Maggie Nelson, and she is a good and entertaining and provocative writer. I read her books about the murder of her aunt in Ann Arbor because I recalled that serial killer story from that time when I lived in Michigan, and "enjoyed' her take on the scene. She's unpredictable, "genre-bending," as her publisher says, and is never boring, though she is by now predictably unpredictable. The first paragraph either invites or repels, as she discusses anal sex with her partner,...