Maggie Nelson: I’ve written for a long time – my whole life – so I guess the larger writing process is just ongoing. Your books are so different to each other – The Argonauts feels almost like a diary – do you feel like you have a specific writing process? Here, Nelson talks to Dazed about her strange career, how The Argonauts made her famous, and how odd it is to see books she wrote 10 years ago finally getting the attention they deserve. Just as the Jane collection was published, the murder case was reopened and Maggie became consumed with following it, an obsession that led to the spectacularly brilliant memoir/true crime book The Red Parts. Jane was murdered in 1969, two years before Nelson was born growing up, the murder hung heavily over her family life. We’re meeting mostly because Jane: A Murder – a poetry collection piecing together fragments of her aunt Jane’s journals with Nelson’s own poems – is being re-issued in the UK this year. When I meet Nelson before her talk, she is self-aware, confident, and unapologetic – perhaps because she’s aware of how unlikely it would be for people to lobby the same criticisms of pretentiousness against a male writer. “I guess people think I’m pretentious,” she laughs when this comes up at the talk, “but I’m not quoting Judith Butler while I cook my breakfast”. Published in 2015, it came after Jane: A Murder (2005) and The Red Parts (2007) – two books inspired by her aunt’s brutal murder – Nelson’s incredible poetry collection Bluets (2009), about the colour blue, and The Art of Cruelty (2011), a book on violence and trauma in the arts. During a recent talk at London’s Southbank Centre, she joked about how, when she was younger, she dreamed of becoming Susan Sontag in some ways – drifting between genres, high and low culture – she has. While Nelson is most famous for The Argonauts, it’s just one book from a two-decade career. As ‘autofiction’, it shows the collapsable boundaries between thinking and feeling, and counts Roxane Gay, Olivia Laing, and Miranda July among its fans.

It’s a small, genre-crossing book that places memoir – mostly Maggie’s relationship with her trans, gender fluid partner, the artist Harry Dodge, as well as her pregnancy with their child – alongside theory on desire and attachment. People didn’t expect Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts to take on the cult status it did, especially not among straight and queer people alike.

The argonauts maggie nelson review