The Argonauts

"This is a book that is about many things, but perhaps most successfully it is about a relationship that undergoes multiple shifts of identity over the course of the book. That relationship is observed with a great deal of precision and honesty, and because of circumstance it also reflects the social and cultural moment the book was written in. For me, one of the reasons why the book is so successful is because it feels written from experience, rather than a thesis. It’s as if Nelson is simply writing about her relationship (with artist Harry Dodge) as it unfolded. That relationship doesn’t fit neatly into the categories that existed at the time, and she forcefully critiques the binaries of our society using an array of intellectual and linguistic tools. But that critique is grounded in experience. The stakes of the argument are personal. I don’t think Nelson relied on those binaries to begin with, so the landscape she moves through is not necessarily one of wreck and ruin. It’s one in which certain structures have been cleared to allow her the space to define herself and her relationship as she sees fit. But let’s be honest. Those binaries and prejudices and norms persist—in fact, at this precise moment, they are rapidly regaining power. There’s a wonderful Michael Wood quote, which I’m going to bastardize here—but it’s something like, ‘I’ve read so many books that half of what I think I’ve lived, I’ve merely read in books.’ I think a lot of writers and readers are like that. The investment is real—you see your life through the filter of reading."

"No one would read this book and think to themselves, ‘Oh, obviously, this is a great work of radical environmentalism.’ This book is a work of creative nonfiction. Maggie Nelson is a theorist, a poet, an essayist—an extraordinary writer and thinker. The book is a meditation on identity, on art , and, after Nelson—who identifies as queer and is married to the gender-fluid artist Harry Dodge—becomes pregnant and has a baby, on reproduction. It is, at heart, a long discussion of relationship: how we relate to others, how the boxes of identity influence those relationships, what we care for and leave behind. Isn’t there something inherently environmental about each of those questions? Henry David Thoreau —an obvious choice for any discussion of radical environmentalism—writes about looking at things with ‘the side of one’s eye’ to gain insight. If one reads The Argonauts with the side of one’s eye, then I think what Nelson is really talking about is listening: listening to the other. Listening, carefully, is an attitude of radical humility—and ‘humility’ like ‘human’ shares an etymological root with the word ‘humus,’ with generative, nutritive soil. At the very end of The Argonauts Nelson writes: “Is there really such a thing as nothingness? I don’t know. I know we’re still here, who knows for how long? Ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.” It seems to me that this notion of living a life blazing with care, of choosing to care for one another, for everything else, is the seed of the radical environmentalism I write about. When we open up environmentalism to include things beyond trees or animals or the water, to people in general—and not just affluent white male hikers, but people of colour, women, LGBTQ+, poor folks—this is the real hard shining core of a radical environmentalism that gets us to interaction, to interrelationship, to what we leave in our wake. If I could have picked a sixth book, it would probably have been The Lost Words by Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris. I have two kids, two boys, a seven-year-old and a three-year-old. I’ve read what seems like thousands of books to them at this point. Sure, I hope to teach them to love words, to increase their vocabulary, and we have fun together. But it occurred to me, somewhere in all that reading, that what I was really doing was sitting with two beings who are very different from me—that we were sharing the space together, that we were sharing a time together, and caring for each other. That, it seems to me, is the point of a radical reproduction—the reproduction of care. I think that this reproduction is so incredibly important, whether one decides to have kids or not. It’s not necessarily about what one passes on to one’s children, but what one passes on generally to all those that are ‘not-me.’ One of the reasons that capitalist reproduction is so antithetical to life is that it’s not about care. It’s about personal accumulation. I think Maggie Nelson gets us to this caring. This caring is part of what I’m trying to recover in my own book as well."

"In Maggie Nelson’s short memoir, nearly everything is flexible. Genres, ideas and bodies all bend, re-form and take on new meanings. Through 143 pages, she tells overlapping stories centered on her romance with the gender-fluid artist Harry Dodge and her own pregnancy. She writes in a long, unbroken sequence of short paragraphs into which she weaves quotes and theories by philosophers, child psychologists, artists, critics and loved ones. The Argonauts is Nelson’s running log of joy and fear in a time of transition — the never-ending voyage of making a family without a map."

"Maggie Nelson's subversive, smart and loving "The Argonauts"."

""The Argonauts," by Maggie Nelson: mind-blowingly heartful and had me weeping on a plane."

"whose “The Argonauts” I devoured"