Why am I passionate about this?
Becoming a mother reshaped me in ways Iâm still wondering at now, two decades on. Iâve had to find ways to resist the repressive cultural mythology surrounding motherhoodâthe pressure I felt to suddenly become a perfect, self-sacrificing vessel for my childrenâs optimized development. When I read stories about flawed mothersâwomen, queer and straight, struggling beneath the magnitude of the job, yet fiercely loving their children all the way throughâI felt I could breathe a little bit, could handle the task with a little more good humor and forgiveness, for myself, my partner, and my kids. Read a book, bust a myth, go hug your mom.
Amy's book list on flawed, fierce, and fascinating mothers
Why did Amy love this book?
Maggie Nelson just dazzles me. Her prose is so sharp and thoughtful, her thinking so idiosyncratically brilliant, her images filled with light. The Argonauts is both memoir and inquiry, a story of how Nelson and her partner Harry, who is in the midst of a gender transition, became parents, a story fraught with obstacles and veined with wisdom. Nelsonâs voice mixes erudition, visceral powerâespecially when she writes about sex and the bodyâand formal innovation. The Argonauts caused a splash when it came out, and for good reasonâits unflinchingly honest portrayal of one queer coupleâs creation of family together is beautiful, brave, and yes, deeply fierce.
4 authors picked The Argonauts as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family
Maggie Nelson's 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. It binds an account of Nelson's relationship with her partner and a journey to and through a pregnancy to a rigorous exploration of sexuality, gender, and "family." An insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.