“In Opie’s nursing self-portrait, she holds and beholds her son Oliver while he nurses, her Pervert scar still visible, albeit ghosted, across her chest. I know of no other book like this, and I know how crucially the culture needs it.' - Michelle Tea 'With a fiercely vulnerable intelligence, Nelson leaves no area un-investigated, including her own heart.

'Maggie Nelson's honesty, intelligence, humor and great writing transform what society might deem a radical, non-traditional lifestyle into the new desirable.' - Annie Sprinkle A gorgeous book, inventive, fearless, and full of heart.' - Kim Gordon ' In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson turns 'making the personal public' into a romantic, intellectual wet dream. 'Buoyant, Nelson soars through art and philosophy and her own experiences with reckless mastery and insurrectionary ease - a virtuosity born of deep reflection and fearless trust in what literature, at its best, can do.' - Wayne Koestenbaum The scare quotes burn off like fog.' - Ben Lerner No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. 'Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture's prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. 'What a dazzlingly generous, gloriously unpredictable book! Maggie Nelson shows us what it means to be real, offering a way of thinking that is as challenging as it is liberating.' - Eula Biss A book that will challenge readers as much as the author has challenged herself.' - Kirkus Her narrative is an honest, joyous affirmation of one happily unconventional family finding itself.' - Publishers Weekly

Nelson's insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book. 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. 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.

At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. 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. An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family - Maggie Nelson's.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson