TJ's Reviews > The Argonauts

Here's what I liked: I liked the way Nelson writes about motherhood. Honest, unashamed, full of a joy with a hugeness to it. I've read some great writing on motherhood published recently (see: Eula Biss' On Immunity) and I deeply appreciate this work, as someone for whom the desire to birth and parent a child is very alien. I have been at times a little bratty in my attitudes towards those who chose to parent, so work that is critical of that attitude and helps demystify parenting feels invaluable to me.

That said, I really didn't care for Nelson's... methodology. She's trying to write in a way that mirrors the messiness of thought, the messiness of processes of learning and growing. Maybe it was unavoidable that this would leave me cringing frequently, but, I don't know, maybe it wasn't? In any case, it was at times really painful. Like, when Nelson describes the sense of mourning she felt as she learned that her baby was a "boy," her mourning for "the fantasy of a feminist daughter, the fantasy of a mini-me." She takes us through the process of accepting the body her baby would be born with, but disappointingly this acceptance does not come at the realization of how very wrong the act of gendering a fetus is; instead it comes when she realizes that she might still "braid his hair!" She tells us about how she felt "surprised" that her body could "make a male body." It's bizarre that someone with a trans spouse could be so oblivious to her own essentializing of her child's gender.
Another example: Nelson briefly takes her reader through her decision to give her child a name of Native American origin. To paraphrase, it goes like this: "Would it be weird for us, as white parents, to give our white child a native name? Probably, but I think we'll do it anyway. And oh! a 'full tribe member' gave us her blessing!" Like...

This review is turning out to be longer than I meant it to be. I guess it feels as if Nelson in this work was grasping at a way of writing that cuts to some authentic and fleeting affect -- but too often it feels like she's gliding over the surface of things, trying to keep up a momentum, trying not to lose something. And some other thing IS being lost. There's not always enough self-reflection, and I just don't know what, really, many of her readers will get out of these moments. She would have done well to step back a little and ask herself what she was really offering us.