Maggie Nelson Addresses Beatriz Preciado, Yvonne Rainer, Memoir and more at Bookforum

The brilliant poet and prose writer, Maggie Nelson, joins conversation with Bookforum to discuss her latest work: The Argonauts. This new work, which follows Nelson's previous literary accomplishments including Bluets and The Art of Cruelty, is an autobiographical meditation on marriage, queerness, and radicality. A great conversation! (We can't wait to buy this book.) More (beginning with Sarah Nicole Prickett's helpful introduction):

Maggie Nelson is the only serious and literary person I’ve encountered whose speech is filled with more “you knows” than mine. Unlike mine, perhaps, her verbal tic is not so much a crutch as a helping hand: she’ll be saying something fast, brilliant, and thoughtful, and maybe you don’t totally get it, but when she says “you know,” she allows you to feel as if you do. Likewise, in her writing she seems able to address anyone, speaking to her readers with the same cool fluency and presumption of being understood she shows in conversing with the philosophers, poets, and heroes of nonfiction—Roland Barthes, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Luce Irigaray, Audre Lorde, Ludwig Wittgenstein—who populate her work. Nelson, the poet and author of Bluets (2009) and The Art of Cruelty (2011), explains her presumptuousness in just the opposite way: In her new book, The Argonauts, she describes solitary, “maniacal bouts of writing, learning to address no one.” (Now when I re-read that passage, I hear “maniacal bouts of writing, learning to address no one, you know?”)

The Argonauts begins where Nelson leaves her solitude behind. She falls into monogamy with Harry Dodge—an artist who goes by “he” but identifies as neither male nor female—and soon they’re living together, she and he and his son. He begins injecting himself with testosterone; she begins injecting herself with sperm. Later, she’s having a baby; his mother is dying of breast cancer. To these exacting dyads, add artful and often funny colloquys on marriage, queerness, and radicality, on ass-fucking and birth, on “sodomitical maternity” and A.L. Steiner, and you get a love song that only occasionally sounds like the essay it technically is.

Nelson’s sentences can be heart-stopping in their structural perfection, yet the most incredible thing about The Argonauts isn’t the language but the lack of noise. The work’s elements are so precisely weighted that no part isn’t necessary: You can begin reading anywhere and feel immediately thrown forward. You know that you won’t want to stop. [...]

Have you read Yvonne Rainer’s book Feelings Are Facts?

I have read that, actually. I really loved it.

She opens it with Terry Eagleton’s review of something else, where he says that memoirs are basically anti-intellectual. And she’s like, so? I don’t care. To her, memoir is more like reporting—and no one decries reporting as anti-intellectual. Although, I don’t really like the word memoir.

Me neither. I’m still trying to understand why the culture around literature is obsessed with its classification. If you develop an obsession with hybridity, you’re only creating a new norm, and then, whenever there’s a new norm, it’s just like, let’s run for the hills, you know? With each of the books I’ve written, I have tried to find a word that I’ve felt comfortable with. When I wrote Jane: A Murder, I was trying to subtitle it for a long time, and then I came across Brian Evenson’s Dark Property: An Affliction. I realized that you could name a book not with a genre but with a noun or even a verb. That was freeing to me, and so Jane became “a murder,” and The Art of Cruelty became “a reckoning,” and so on. The Argonauts doesn’t have a subtitle, but I don’t mind it being called “autotheory.” I allowed that to go in the jacket copy. [...]

Continue reading at Bookforum. And if that's not enough of a Maggie Nelson fix for you, read this interview with Nelson by Emily Gould.