Julie Ehlers's Reviews > The Argonauts

When I was in my early twenties and just out of school, I was lucky enough to get a job as a production/copy editor for a smallish academic press. My women's studies minor was enough to get me put in charge of the women's studies and LGBT studies offerings, and over the years I copyedited probably thousands of journal articles and book manuscripts on these topics. It was a wonderful education in many ways. At the time, marriage for same-sex couples was a distant dream, and I was a witness, in the form of their writings, to the work people who'd been shut out of the mainstream were doing to carve out their own lives. I don't want to idealize this time, of course--the discrimination gay people faced regarding marriage (among other things) was hideous and wrong, and no one supported marriage equality more than I did. But there was something inspiring about seeing people really ask themselves: If I can't have (or don't want) what the mainstream has, what kind of life do I want? Over and over again I got the message: You don't have to live your life the way everyone else does if you don't want to. You can decide for yourself what you want your life to be. My young self absorbed this message like a sponge. At every turn I asked myself: Was I just going along with convention? Was I just reacting against convention? Or was this what I really wanted? I can't say my life has been perfect as a result, but I can say it's always been authentic. I have those writings, which raised me and guided me like nothing else, to thank for that.

Reading The Argonauts reminded me of those days while still being as fresh and bracing as a cobweb-clearing winter draft. I admired and was grateful for the way Maggie and Harry refused to be boxed in, refused to be pinned down, refused to be labeled; always thinking, always resisting conventional ideas, for themselves, for their marriage, for their relationships with their kids. Naming something, Nelson points out, limits it. Why, this book makes you wonder, are we so quick to nail things down? Why are we so inclined to believe there are only one or two ways to be happy? The complicated freedom this book represents is something I want to clasp to myself and keep with me always.

This is not an overly intellectual or complex book, but it's a smart one, and it requires some focus, and reading it made me realize how much I love and miss writing that demands such focus. Here is a book that feels no need to dumb it down for anyone, that asks for your attention and gets it, and I became addicted to that feeling of thinking about only what Maggie Nelson was saying and not the million other things that tend to crowd my mind. This is a short book, but I put it down many times because I didn't want to finish it too quickly. I knew I would be sorry when it was over, and I was.

The title of this book is a metaphor for the idea that love, while it may always be present, needs always be remade as the people involved change and grow and evolve. Ideally, love shows different sides of itself over time, is, as Nelson puts it in her acknowledgments, "an infinite conversation, an endless becoming." I finished this book the day before Valentine's Day, and what an antidote it was to the fake idealized commercialism of that occasion. Maggie Nelson and I have next to nothing in common on the surface, but I can think of no book that has better reminded me of where my own heart lies.