The Argonauts

2015 National Book Critic's Circle Award for Criticism

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The Argonauts impacted me deeply, and continues to with each revisit. While it should be required reading for everyone, it's absolutely invaluable to anybody navigating or coming into any kind of queer identity. Maggie Nelson effortlessly combines poetics, prose, and theory to create something both breathtaking and wholly original. The title invokes the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, the great ship that is rebuilt piece by piece on its voyage until it finally docks as something entirely different from the ship that set sail. She parallels her own changing body through pregnancy with that of her nonbinary partner as they transition, their love a process of slowly changing together toward something new. Nelson understands our impulses to categorize in order to understand and ultimately survive, but wants us to remember that no answer is so easy. Instead, she bids us to think better and feel deeper, to look upon "the transitive, the flight, the great soup of being in which we actually live." Recommended By Cosima C., Powells.com

I hadn't read any of Maggie Nelson's other work before this, so I was unfamiliar with the stream of consciousness style of writing. Once I got into the book, however, I found the notes in the margin helpful guides, and I quickly passed this book along once I was finished with it. This book speaks to so many core human experiences, like childbirth, parenthood, queerness, and just being alive, that I was deeply and unexpectedly moved.  Recommended By Junix S., Powells.com

The Argonauts is a book I wanted to reread before I was even halfway through. Maggie Nelson shakes up all gender-queer stereotypes as she grows into a wife, a stepmom, and then a birth mother. She writes in a way that is literary, poetic, and academic. I would consider this canon for queer reads.  Recommended By Andy A., Powells.com

A seamless blend of memoir and cultural commentary, Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is, among many other things, a book about relentless introspection and transformation, about confronting one's own truths and biases and finding meaning in collisions big and small. Nelson explores the course of her relationship with the transgender artist Harry Dodge, along with their attempts to get pregnant, her experiences with academia, and her roles as mother and stepmother. Told in brief, loaded sections and referencing everything from gender theorists to parenting books to philosophers, The Argonauts is a book that is best read slowly; there is much to savor in this urgent, fiercely intelligent work. Recommended By Renee P., Powells.com

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 artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes the author’s account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, is an intimate portrayal of the complexities and joys of (queer) family making.
 
Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals like 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 childrearing. Nelson’s insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.

“The Argonauts is a moving exploration of family and love, but it’s also a meditation on the seductions, contradictions, limitations, and beauties of being normal, as a person and as an artist.” The New Yorker

“A fiercely provocative and intellectually audacious memoir. . . . 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. . . . A book that will challenge readers as much as the author has challenged herself.” Kirkus (starred review)

“Nelson’s vibrant, probing and, most of all, outstanding book is also a philosophical look at motherhood, transitioning, partnership, parenting, and family-an examination of the restrictive way we’ve approached these terms in the past and the ongoing struggle to arrive at more inclusive and expansive definitions for them.” NPR

Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic, and the author of several nonfiction books including The Red Parts, 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.