a book

The Argonauts

Name: The Argonauts
Rating: 5 (8 reviews)
Author: Maggie Nelson
ISBN: 9781555977351

Maggie Nelson · 2015 · 160 pages

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. It binds an account of Nelson's relationship with her partner and a journey to and through a pregnancy to a rigorous exploration of sexuality, gender, and "family." An insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.

recommended by 8 people

sourced from public statements

Kim Gordon
“Maybe the best writer. The way she naturally and effortlessly integrates her life with her inner, critical self, without being meta about it, and always finds the place that no one else occupies but always seems to makes perfect sense.”↗
Carrie Brownstein
“Such an amazing book. What I liked about it was the form, you know? It starts out very theoretical, like it’s just this ontological exploration, very polemical, and you can feel that it’s kind of brittle up top, and dense. And like, as she is changing—this is why it’s like a poem—it starts to just open, the narrative, it’s like you can feel the air in the pages, and the whole story starts to loosen, and she’s kind of loosening from this place of just being, you know, in her head. I thought it was so beautiful, that exploration, because, like a poem, you could see the form being affected by her story. I loved all the references in the margins. It was one of those books where I thought, ‘Everyone should read this book.'”↗
All 32 of Emma Watson
“The story is about the author’s relationship with artist Harry Dodge, who is fluidly gendered. It’s about their romance, the birth of their son, the death of Harry’s mother and their changing bodies, as Maggie becomes pregnant and Harry undergoes surgery, but it’s also about inclusion and the powers and shortfalls of language. It might require a bit of work but The Argonauts rewards us with an expansive way of considering identity, caretaking, and freedom—along with a liberation from, what Maggie calls, ‘the demand that anyone live a life that’s all one thing.’”↗
Emma Watson
Anya Taylor-Joy
Suzannah Lipscomb
Daegan Miller
Audrey Gelman