Reviews with content warning for Sexual content - The Argonauts

I am only 5% in but I think I should DNF it. There is a lot of beautiful language here but I don't think it's for me. I thought the story was fiction but it's a memoir that reads like a diary. The writing is at times extremely beautiful and poignant but other times it was chaotic, pretentious, and impossible to follow. I might continue but it's really hard for me to read the book given she's talking about real people, it just feels like I'm invading everyone's privacy. I hope later on in the book queerness and gendernormativity are explored with more diversity and intersectionality. At this point I would rate it 3/5 stars.

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robinks's review against another edition

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challenging reflective slow-paced

3.25

As a disclaimer: I think this book would’ve come across better in print format instead of audiobook. Some of the formatting and content felt disjointed in audio. That being said, I had a hard time figuring out what this story was trying to communicate, though it did bring up some good questions about blended families for reflection.

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lottiegasp's review

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challenging emotional hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.75

This is a beautifully written memoir of Nelson's relationship with her trans partner Harry, her stepson and their new baby. As a queer feminist in what can be mistaken as a heteronormative family, Nelson explores issues of gender, queerness, feminism, family and motherhood.

I thought it had really interesting perspectives about being queer, feminist and shunning societal norms while cherishing love and family. Rightfully so, a lot of feminism focusses on empowering women and genderqueer people to be single and child-free, to not be stuck in unfulfilling and unequal relationships, and to find and cherish love elsewhere. But for people who do seek and find love through their romantic partner and children, I think it is important to consider how to do these things in a way that does not simply reinforce the hetero status quo. This is something Nelson grapples with, while portraying how she and Harry have approached things.

At some parts in the middle I found the writing and references to other scholars a bit dense. Nevertheless, I overall appreciated the rich, aesthetic literary writing style, which is perhaps more common in fiction than memoirs.

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steveatwaywords's review

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challenging emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

Nelson's "autotheory" memoir has already been praised by many, so I will echo the analysis: this is a remarkably intimate and scholarly work, synthesizing subjects often avoided and even cautioned against. Progressive and stark, Nelson takes on a tour of her dynamic and at times uncertain domestic life--her partner's transition, her own sexuality, the death of a parent, the murder of a sister, the entangling estrangement of pregnancy and child-rearing--and twines it with the threads of literary and gender theory: Sedgwick, Butler, Lacan, Foucault, Lambert, Wittig, Carson, Winnicott, and a host of others. The result is evocative, explicit, inspiring, reverential, and sobering.

This book is not easily navigable. While written in fragmentary pieces, the narrative is delivered in its entirety, a submersion of its whole, and one wonders at its turnings. Nelson writes while on a subway, at a cafe, surrounded by tumult, but what she offers is insular and contained, a cerebral dissection of her own life and how words, language, people shift. Derrida remarked that he wondered most about the sex lives of philosophers. Nelson has here made a powerful bridge (more a marriage) between the abstraction of teleology and the workings of body.

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maess's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

4.75

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o3tri's review

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medium-paced

1.0

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