Mini Book Review: The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

sighs dramatically

This was my Goodreads/The Storygraph review of The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson:

“boring and made me feel stupid, felt like homework (in a bad way) (yes i know it's literally theory but i thought it would be more accessible considering how popular it is)”

I like being challenged when I read. I enjoy encountering new ideas or old ideas in interesting ways. I really value originality in form and content and get bored when I feel like I’m reading something that I’ve read before.

Additionally, I am not a complete beginner when it comes to feminist and queer theory (although I’m no expert, either). Poke around this website and you’ll notice I won an award for my dramaturgy on I’m Very Into You, an adaptation of emails between Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark, so I have an ounce of feminist theory street cred. My undergrad transcripts include courses on American women writers, living female playwrights, and gender and performance in 18th century literature. I’ve read and studied theory and criticism, it’s not a foreign concept to me.

With all this in mind, you would have think I would have enjoyed our found insight in Maggie Nelson’s journey through IVF, pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood, especially since those are all topics I care about deeply. For a 25-year-old no where near having kids of my own, I think a lot about it. Following Maggie’s journey to motherhood on her own terms, alongside the gender transition of her partner, Harry, had a lot of viscerally beautiful moments, and the contrast of their experiences side-by-side was thought-provoking and impactful.

All that being said, I found it really difficult to get into this book. The moments of memoir were buried under and between so much theory, much of which required knowledge of other texts, artists, performers, etc, that I found it very difficult to stay engaged. Nelson is known for being genre-bending and The Argonauts is described as “autotheory,” meaning it’s part autobiography/memoir part theory/criticism, but I would describe it as heavy on the theory. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, which, fair, but it was also a New York Times Bestseller, so I expected it to be a little more accessible to a general audience.

I feel like I’m being hard on this book because it made me feel unintelligent, which might be true. I know I said I like feeling challenged, but I don’t like feeling like a book that is so widely popular is so far over my head that I don’t even understand the appeal.

Of my Goodreads friends, three others have read and rated it, and all of them liked it considerably more than I did. However, when I posted on my Instagram story that I was reading it and didn’t like it, at least four people responded that they couldn’t even get through it. My cynical reading of this is that my Goodreads friends want to seem smart, but my Instagram friends are happy to be honest in my DMs.

Can I just chalk it up to taste? There are tons of popular things I don’t like, and I don’t feel bad about disliking it or assume my friends that do only like it performatively. But for what ever reason I can’t let this one go. It got under my skin. Maybe I’ll read it again when I’m a mom, or when I have a master’s degree, or both. Maybe then I’ll understand it. Then again, maybe I won’t.