And merely nudging their boundaries in one direction or another is not an altogether appealing solution. Normal, in this sense, represents the rules and expectations that Nelson’s family defies by existing.
Or reinforce it (unforgiveable).” Afterward, they pick up Maggie’s stepson from day care and eat chocolate pudding in sleeping bags on their porch. Normal, on one hand, is the dehumanizing bureaucracy that makes it an ordeal to book Harry an airline ticket without checking “male” or “female” it’s the spectre of a homophobic family-court judge who could return Nelson’s stepson to Harry’s ex it’s the “YES ON PROP 8” signs that appear near their home in Los Angeles, depicting “four stick figures raising their hands to the sky, in a paroxysm of joy-the joy, I suppose, of heteronormativity.” Nelson and Dodge-already happily, queerly domestic-decide to get married when it looks like Prop 8, the California gay-marriage ban, might actually pass. “The Argonauts” is a moving exploration of family and love, but it’s also a meditation on the seductions, contradictions, limitations, and beauties of being normal, as a person and as an artist. (She came around fast, but not before Dodge gently reassured her: “ Hey, I was born female, and look how that turned out.”)īut who really counts as a normal pregnant lady, anyway? Does such a thing even exist? As Nelson wonders early in the book: Or that their child was conceived with donor sperm through artificial insemination, and that, when Nelson learned her baby would be a boy, she experienced a brief, guilty interlude of mourning for the feminist daughter she wouldn’t get to raise. That she came to motherhood after years of “harshly deriding ‘the breeders,’ ” for example, and that her baby’s other parent-Nelson’s partner, the fluidly gendered artist Harry Dodge-is “a debonair butch on T” (testosterone). The subtext here is that the military personnel could not possibly see the many ways in which Nelson fails to fulfill an imagined ideal of airport Madonna. “So this is the seduction of normalcy,” she thinks, shocked, and smiles back-“compromised and radiant.” More than once, service members in airports salute her. Some of what she encounters is predictable: old men at her lectures ask patronizing questions strangers offer her their seats. She’s travelling alone, on weekends, to promote “The Art of Cruelty” (her previous book), and she’s noticing the world’s response to her body. Midway through “The Argonauts,” her new memoir, the poet and critic Maggie Nelson describes undertaking a book tour while pregnant. “The Argonauts,” by Maggie Nelson, is an exploration of family and love and a meditation on what it means to be normal, as a person and as an artist.
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