The Santa Ana winds are shredding the bark off the eucalyptus trees in long white stripes. This is the opening paragraph of the book: For 12 years she taught in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts in fall 2017 she will join the faculty of USC. in English Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and has taught literature, writing, art, criticism and theory at the New School, Pratt Institute, and Wesleyan University.

She writes frequently on art, including recent catalogue essays on Carolee Schneemann and Matthew Barney. She has also been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA in Poetry, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, and an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. In 2016 she was awarded a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005 finalist for the PEN/ Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir). Her nonfiction titles include the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Times bestseller The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Norton, 2011 a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets (Wave Books, 2009 named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts (Free Press, 2007 reissued by Graywolf, 2016), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (U of Iowa Press, 2007). Maggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. Nelson's insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book. Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.

At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. 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. An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson