The argonauts /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family

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 the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.
Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals such as 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 child-rearing. Nelson's insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

In this short but incredibly rich autobiographical meditation, Nelson (The Art of Cruelty) explores sexuality, childbearing, child rearing, and what it means to love and be loved. No mere romance, this book erases the physical, emotional, even literary boundaries that help human beings categorize their thoughts and feelings. Through the story of her love for, and marriage to, Harry Dodge (who is treated with testosterone and has a double mastectomy yet prefers to be labeled with no established gender), Nelson enacts the erasure of limits she explores in her writing. Drawing upon work by Judith Butler, Jean Baudrillard, and Roland Barthes (from whom she takes the book's title), as well as pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, Nelson blends philosophical inquiry, memoir, and gender criticism in a form she has dubbed "autotheory." Like her writing, Nelson's theory blurs, eradicates, even breaks the margins of binary thinking and of the prevailing normative notion that we should each live a life that is "all one thing." Verdict Read by the author, this work is highly recommended.-Wendy Galgan, St. Francis Coll., Brooklyn © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

In a fast-shifting terrain of "homonormativity," Nelson, poet and author of numerous works of gender and sexuality (The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning; Bluets), plows ahead with a disarmingly blushing work about trying to simultaneously embrace her identity, her marriage with nomadic transgender filmmaker Harry, and motherhood. She mixes a memoir of her love for Harry with clinical depictions of their attempts to get her pregnant, as well as a critical meditation on the queer craft of "becoming," investigating the ways that "new kinship systems mime older nuclear-family arrangements" and whether those older models are good, oppressive, useful, or fair. Nelson takes her title from the notion that the Argonauts could continually replace their ship's parts over time, "but the boat [was] still called the Argo." The new waters she's sailing include learning how to be a stepparent to Harry's young son and then a mother to her newborn, no longer scorning heterosexual "breeders," and becoming much more forgiving of what she once saw as too-outrageous queer radicalism, since all-including her husband, undergoing his own gender voyage via testosterone therapy and surgery-have a "shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy." Nelson writes in fine, fragmented exhalations, inserting quotes from numerous theorists as she goes (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, D.W. Winnicott). Her narrative is an honest, joyous affirmation of one happily unconventional family finding itself. Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Associates. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Book Review

A fiercely provocative and intellectually audacious memoir that focuses on motherhood, love and gender fluidity.Nelson (Critical Studies/CalArts; The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, 2012, etc.) is all over the map in a memoir that illuminates Barthes and celebrates anal eroticism (charging that some who have written about it hide behind metaphor, whereas she's plain from the first paragraph that she's more interested in the real deal). This is a book about transitioning, transgendering, transcending and any other trans- the author wants to connect. But it's also a love story, chronicling the relationship between the author and her lover, the artist Harry Dodge, who was born a female (or at least had a female name) but has more recently passed for male, particularly with the testosterone treatments that initially concerned the author before she realized her selfishness. The relationship generally requires "pronoun avoidance." This created a problem in 2008, when the New York Times published a piece on Dodge's art but insisted that the artist "couldn't appear on their pages unless you chose Mr. or Ms.You chose Ms., to take one for the team.' " Nelson was also undergoing body changes, through a pregnancy she had desired since the relationship flourished. She recounts 2011 as "the summer of our changing bodies." She elaborates: "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." The author turns the whole process and concept of motherhood inside out, exploring every possible perspective, blurring the distinctions among the political, philosophical, aesthetic and personal, wondering if her writing is violating the privacy of her son-to-be as well as her lover. Ultimately, Harry speaks within these pages, as the death of Dodge's mother and the birth of their son bring the book to its richly rewarding climax. A book that will challenge readers as much as the author has challenged herself. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic, and nonfiction author of books such as The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning , Bluets , and Jane: A Murder . She teaches in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts and lives in Los Angeles, California.