The Argonauts wants to untie the knots that limit the way we talk about gender and the institutions of marriage and childbirth. Nelson interrogates how this feels, but is more interested in redefining what a family might mean. The couple have an apparently conventional domestic set-up, “flush with joy in our house on the hill”, and on the street or in restaurants they are often treated as a “normal” heterosexual family – man, pregnant woman, young child. “Or rather, it is romantic, erotic and consuming … I have my baby, and my baby has me.”ĭuring the summer of 2011, as Nelson’s body is changing with her pregnancy, Dodge’s body is altering too – after years of being unable to live in his skin, with neck and back “pulsing with pain” from breast-binding, he injects testosterone and eventually undergoes “top surgery” (a double mastectomy). It is a love affair,” she writes of her and Iggy. The book charts Nelson’s pregnancy, the birth of her son Iggy, and her first experiences as a mother: “It isn’t like a love affair. It soon emerges that this is a tale of more than one love. Nelson, once dismissive of “breeders”, suddenly becomes an adoring step-parent, folding a young child’s tiny clothes. Setting up home, they aren’t just a couple but a family: with them is Dodge’s three-year-old son from a previous relationship. She relates how she and Dodge have great sex (“was his sexual power, which I already felt to be immense, a kind of spell I’d fallen under…?”), move in together and get married.

Handsome, brilliant, quick-witted, articulate, forceful, you.” The book tells how Nelson, after years of painful solitude, begins a joyful relationship with the artist Harry Dodge – she is amazed to come to terms with “the nearly exploding fact that I’ve so obviously gotten everything I’d ever wanted, everything there was to get. A blend of autobiographical writing, comment and quotation, it is about many things, one of which is love.

F rom the moment last year when The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson’s most recent book, was published in her native US, it was much talked-about, fervently recommended, highly fashionable.

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