Maggie Nelson’s Family Matters

For poet and critic Maggie Nelson, writing is easier than childbirth — and that speaks volumes. The author of Bluets, The Art of Cruelty, and, her latest, The Argonauts, has explored through poetry and prose the painful topics of murder, artful violence, and grief. The Argonauts uses a personal lens to examine a more insidious form of brutality — transphobia –while also gesturing toward the cultural and political resistance required to combat it. She tells me “poetry is part of my heart,” but in this book about motherhood, couplehood, and creating a queer family, she blends poetry with memoir and critical theory. She creates an experience as impressionistic and innovative as Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation and as intimate and intricate as the work of comics artist Alison Bechdel. The very act of reading The Argonauts feels revolutionary.

Nelson got her start as, in her words, a “poet-hustler.” She told The Believer, “I came up in the world in New York City in the ’90s as a D.I.Y. writer, where I never thought anyone was going to give a shit.” For years, she toiled at various service industry jobs while writing on the side. She wrote poetry to sell at rock shows and studied postmodern dance. But despite her punk roots, she ultimately fell in love with writing and with poetry in particular. The latter was the “fastest laboratory,” and she delighted in her lexical experiments.

She says that her ensuing books were born of “psychological urgency.” Her works Jane: A Murder and The Red Parts were prompted by the need to understand the unsolved murder of an aunt whom she never knew. Nelson says, “That book [Jane: A Murder] began with a series of dreams I was having about being shot in the head. A friend of mine said, ‘Didn’t you mention that your mother’s sister died by being shot in the head by a stranger?’ ” Nelson’s attraction to this family trauma was subconscious. It was a way to cope with the tragic loss of a young family member who was still peering out at the horizon. “It was a sort of portal I had to go through,” Nelson says. The writing of the book was a traumatic repetition that, once complete, prevented her from feeling further plagued by her aunt’s murder.

Even when focusing on less intimate subject matter, Nelson takes a highly personal approach. Her book Bluets explores color, but as Catherine Lacey has said, “[Nelson] broadens the definition of blue from a merely visual phenomenon to a vehicle for the divine.” Nelson says that, with Bluets, “I really wanted to write a book about color perception, but it became clear to me that it wouldn’t be interesting or honest or rooted if it weren’t also about the way it connected with other things like pain or heartbreak.” Her work The Art of Cruelty probes the ways in which artists utilize cruelty in their works to explore, exploit, or expunge pain. But despite her focus on other artists, The Art of Cruelty remains a sibling to her previous memoirs about her aunt. She sees the work as the third book in a trilogy.  While they all interrogate pain, violence, and depictions of brutality, the latter “was kind of a great relief for me to think through these issues . . . vis-à-vis other people’s art rather than examples from my life.”

The Argonauts marks her return to the landscape of the personal. Here, Nelson examines her relationship with genderqueer artist Harry Dodge, who is undergoing a gender transition at the same time that Nelson is pregnant. The Argonauts is a meditation on bodies, gender, families, and transformation at a time when the gulf between the progress of trans visibility and the lack of progress of trans rights has never been wider. “I was really trying to work out something about recent thinking about queerness — these questions about homonormativity or heteronormativity,” she says of her latest book. Written during the tumult of Prop 8, which nullified same-sex marriage in California, it was her way of understanding her burgeoning queer family. “We all participate in all sorts of things that have an unjust structure,” she says. “It’s figuring out how you’re going to balance that contamination with trying to work towards the change that you want to see.” Visceral, provocative, and sui generis, The Argonauts poses open questions about traditional notions of gender — and genre.

Nelson’s work is as psychologically urgent for her readers as it is for her. “We’re in a moment of trying to find a new, better, and just way for people to live and define themselves and make families should they so choose to,” she says. The Argonauts offers a testament to this vital journey.