‘Argonauts’ author Nelson to share her story at Pitt
Maggie Nelson, the award-winning author of “The Argonauts,” “The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning” and “Bluets,” is bringing her genre-defying work to Pittsburgh.
Ms. Nelson, who won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism for “The Argonauts,” has created a most singular memoir, writing about her experiences with caretaking, motherhood and family with poetic grace while also critiquing various modes of art, gender and sexual politics.
She’ll speak Thursday at 8:30 p.m. at the University of Pittsburgh’s Frick Fine Arts Auditorium in Oakland as part of the Contemporary Writers Series.
Her work certainly doesn’t shy away from the political, but what is remarkable is how easily she makes the political personal, and vice versa.
“I knew when I was writing ‘The Argonauts’ that all of its concerns about homonormativity and so on were definitely of its moment, which was a moment of social progress for LGBTQ people,” the author said via email earlier this month.
Yet with the election of Donald Trump, she noted that, “The backlash is always ready and waiting, and in some respects clarifying, as it makes clear how antiLGBTQ sentiment links up with planet killing, worker killing, immigrant bashing, white supremacist, public school enervating, misogynist ideologies.”
There are moments in “The Argonauts” that feel deeply personal, but as a writer she is also aware of the way the truth can bend when writing about oneself.
“Any act of autobiographical writing represents one set of truths, or as far as one could get in any given period of time,” Ms. Nelson said. “But I can always see where I was fooling myself a little here and there, or hedging my bets, or some time goes by and I now see things differently. That’s all part of the process, otherwise we would be ossified beings.”
Her writing about her experiences with queerness, transgender bodies, pregnancy and motherhood explores the possibilities of what it means to be a woman in a time when the culture is still so willing to place women in set roles — mother, wife, sexual object, crone — and her interest in the infinite narratives women’s lives follow is refreshing.
“We get somewhere entirely different when we don’t try to fold women into pre-existing narratives and models, but rather start further back, before those narratives and models have been formed,” she said.
Ultimately, her interest in the messiness of human stories runs deep.
“I believe irresolution and uncertainty and mess and nuance to be our birthrights and respect them as such,” she said.