![]() Maggie Nelsonīut as I read and reread The Argonauts, what generosity feels like isn’t only a capaciousness of thought. At turns humorous and devastating, and laced with citations from a litany of writers that seamlessly enter the text, The Argonauts is as fantastic as you’ve heard it is: “ Generative and generous ,” “ Generous and intimate ,” “ What a dazzlingly generous, gloriously unpredictable book! ” Ecstatically, I fall in line. Following the story of Nelson’s relationship with the artist Harry Dodge as he and Nelson form a family - while Dodge takes testosterone injections and undergoes a double mastectomy, and while Nelson becomes pregnant with her their son Iggy - The Argonauts asks us to loosen and undo the binary thinking that limits our experiences of one another. The book’s cultural and personal backdrops show a society beginning to rethink the terms of gender and sexuality, but also a society still reinforcing a violent status quo on desire, love and the terms of the body. Generous is a word that circulates and frames so many descriptions of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, a genre-fluid memoir that was recently awarded the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. ![]()
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