Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, offering fierce and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is the story of the author’s relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story includes Nelson’s account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy. It offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.
The Argonauts is philosophical and deep. It took me a few pages to get into it, but once I did, I found it highly interesting. It is very short, but not exactly a quick read; it requires a lot of thought and attention.
I expected The Argonauts to read more like a typical memoir, but Nelson actually dives heavily into feminism and gender theory, with a collection of swirling thoughts. The book is all detached paragraphs, no indentations and no visible chapter breaks. For a work that was largely composed in sections, The Argonauts is a keenly conceived whole.
Writing in the same spirit as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to an exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson tells, in no particular order, of getting sober, falling in love and getting married, supporting her partner’s morphing gender expression, becoming a stepmother, getting pregnant, giving birth and parenting a newborn.
And this is how one realizes just how powerful this little book is.
The Argonauts is a thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.
The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson, Melville House UK, £9.99
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