The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson
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The Argonauts

Updated: 7 Sep 2020
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.
Actress
351 followers
303 FLIISTs
over 4 years ago
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.
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Actress
45 followers
116 FLIISTs
over 4 years ago
Sometimes reading about another person’s life brings you closer to your own. That’s what this beautifully honest novel did for me. It’s a must-read.
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Actress
45 followers
116 FLIISTs
12 months ago
Thank you rowanblanchard for lending me a book that draws me towards the people inside it and the person inside me. ❇️🌈💙🎆
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Actress, Director, Writer
2 followers
82 FLIISTs
4 months ago
This book doesn’t fit neatly into a category. It’s personal but also global. It doesn’t prescribe anything; it raises questions. It allows the reader to feel as if they are watching this brilliant woman think in real time. It seems as if you are inside her mind with her. It’s funny and sexy and made me cry. And it is one of the best books on being a stepmother I’ve ever encountered.
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