Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir

3.9/5 ( ratings)

Stunning for her daring originality, the author of Negroland gives us what she calls "a temperamental autobiography," comprised of visceral, intimate fragments that fuse criticism and memoir.

Margo Jefferson constructs a nervous system with pieces of different lengths and tone, conjoining arts writing with life writing . The book's structure is determined by signal moments of her life, those that trouble her as well as those that thrill and restore. In this nervous system:
- The sounds of a black spinning disc of a 1950's jazz LP as intimate and instructive as a parent's voice.
- The muscles and movements of a ballerina, spliced with those of an Olympic runner: template for what a female body could be.
- Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy finds her way into the art of Kara Walker and the songs of C�cile McLorin Salvant.
- Bing Crosby and Ike Turner become alter egos.
- W.E.B. DuBois and George Eliot meet illicitly, as he appropriates lines from her story "The Hidden Veil" to write his famous "behind the veil" passages in The Souls of Black Folk.
- The words of multiple others act as prompts and as dialogue.
The fragments of this brilliant book, while not neglecting family, race, and class, are informed by a kind of aesthetic drive: longing, ecstasy, or even acute ambivalence. Constructing a nervous system is Jefferson's relentlessly galvanizing mis en scene for unconventional storytelling as well as a platform for unexpected dramatis personae.