The Argonauts memorably opens with a scene of feral vulnerability: I love you—the words, Maggie Nelson writes, “come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the cement floor of your dank and charming bachelor pad. You had Molloy by your bedside and a stack of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall. Does it get any better? What’s your pleasure? you asked, then stuck around for an answer.”

A few days later she sends Harry Dodge—of the aforementioned you, an artist and Nelson’s now long-term partner—a passage from Roland Barthes comparing the Argo, whose parts are replaced while the ship’s name remains the same, to the nature of love’s expression over time. By mid-book, Nelson is pregnant and Dodge is taking T and getting top surgery. About their changing bodies, she writes, “On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more ‘male,’ mine, more and more ‘female.’ But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.”

With its shrewd integration of memoir and theory, maternity and queerness, since its publication in 2015 The Argonauts has brought new life and new audiences to autotheory—a term used since the ’90s to describe work, with early innovations in women of color feminist writing, that combines autobiography and embodied subjectivity with theory and philosophy. Nelson's book feels exemplary while defying classification.

A decade old this year, The Argonauts tells the story of many forms of love, wrestled with and renewed with hot abandon and scrupulousness. In her writing before and since, Nelson has taken up subjects as specific and wide-ranging as the color blue, freedom, love, cruelty, chronic pain, and profusion with her distinctive sensibility: a thoroughness of thought that seeks to see beyond the options first presented, often leading her and her readers to different, more interesting questions.

With creative precision, poetry (how she came up) meets form (how she creates the container each book calls for). Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that “the test of a book (to a writer) is if it makes a space in which, quite naturally, you can say what you want to say.” Nelson’s various, and very different, projects are a testament to this observation, and to another made by her teacher Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: “In every language the loveliest question / is, You can say that?” Describing the nominative of the theory she helped pioneer, Sedgwick called queer “a continuing moment, movement, motive—recurrent, eddying, troublant. Keenly, it is relational, and strange.” A “perpetual excitement,” Nelson adds, like the Argo; like love naming itself, again and again.

Nelson meets this difficult flux unlike any other. Her friend and teacher Wayne Koestenbaum has described her style as “bathing in the light that comes from irresolvability.” Or, as Nelson puts it in The Argonauts, relating Barthes and Sedgwick, hers is a presence to writing and thinking that “demands an attentiveness—a relentlessness, even—whose very rigor tips it into ardor.”

Happy birthday to The Argonauts—how does it feel for the book to be a decade old? It’s been so influential in conversations about autotheory (you’ve said you stole the term from Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie), genre, and formal experimentation. It’s become a classic in queer and feminist circles. I wonder how you feel 10 years and many books later about this important work of yours.

In some ways 10 years doesn’t feel like that long, though it is a while. I think I probably don’t see its influence as much as people on the outside do. What you just described, I was like, Oh really? That’s nice. I think I don’t quite know that exactly, but I know the tremendous unexpected journey that the whole thing took me on. It was my ninth book, or something like that. I was happy enough going along publishing books, so I wasn’t really thinking that this book would be any different in terms of its reception in the world. I’m really grateful.

With any book, you do the best you can do with the project you’ve set for yourself, and then either it has a greater sum of its parts or it doesn’t. And it’s been super happy-making to be like, Wow, I don’t think all of this would be happening if the book weren’t somehow greater than the sum of its parts. I’ve recently had conversations about its international reach, doing book events in other countries, seeing translations, and hearing stories of passages read at weddings. That it’s been meaningful to other people—it’s something I never imagined.

When I think about the moment that the book was written compared to the political moment we’re in right now, that’s super dismal. I don’t know what you could say was expected or unexpected, but certainly it’s not the queer conversation, What will we do when we get all these rights and we lose our pervy hearts? It gives me a lot to think about.

I did want to ask about that, the moment of writing versus now. In the book you and Harry get married just as Prop 8 passes, and in 2015, the year it came out, the Supreme Court made same-sex marriage legal nationwide. The Argonauts famously troubles the line between the so-called radical and the so-called normative, and, as you say, we’re in a very different moment now. But it still feels as important to trouble that line, if maybe for some different reasons and some similar ones but in a different context.

There’s a kind of normcore reading of the book that could be like, Oh, we’re just like you, we’re making family and experiencing love and care, why can’t we all live together? But I think that to me, both when I wrote it and today, I see a different discourse. Which is what someone like Judith Butler has been reminding us all along—that it’s not any particular identities that we’re necessarily fighting for, but it’s against the forces that would discipline and punish people for wanting to live their lives however they choose to live them. Whether that means the life of a householder or a radical childless queer. The book’s last line, which ends with something like, “ablaze with our care, its ongoing song”—that care and that song are so fungible. In that sense, it doesn’t feel to me outmoded in the least.

Maybe it’s the feeling that this refusal to discipline difference is even more important when codifying identity seems like the main event, whether in opposition or protection. You mention Butler. The work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, so present throughout the book, also feels relevant.

I think all the time about what Eve would’ve thought about this moment we’re in, especially because she was facing the very oppressive right-wing of the AIDS era and of the discipline and vitriol that met queer studies at its inception. She wrote really eloquently about all that [in her collection Tendencies, especially her essay “Queer and Now"]. I think people my age have been thinking a lot about that time and what habits or strategies we can learn from it, what we’re facing now and how it feels different. Rather than the kind of homicidal neglect of that era, now there’s more of a sadistic reaching into the communities themselves, or the zealots they have going through all the different language used in gender studies departments. I’m like, Wow, you guys know more about this field than I do.

Your writing is rightly praised for its precision, but it’s also often so funny. There are humorous moments in The Argonauts, which is better known for its other qualities. In Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth, published earlier this year, the narrator relays her dreams:

“I see a text this person has sent him—it’s very touchy-feely, jargon-filled—I think it’s beneath him.
Yet it’s so different from me, I can see its allure.
H says something about her ability to brainstorm. And I think to myself, I will never 'brainstorm,' I’ll keep my ideas private until the last minute, I will never be what you desire.”

This makes me laugh and internally cringe (with recognition?) in part because it holds within it such a range of complex feelings, and I wanted to ask how you think about humor in your writing, and even specifically in writing about love and sex.

Well, that’s really nice. I try to amuse myself. And I was also interested, especially in Pathemata where I’m writing about chronic pain, in a tone or a sound that was not melancholic through and through, but that actually had the theater of the absurd attending to it.

I had a lot of fun writing that book and working with my dreams. Part of what I liked about it is that I might wake up feeling really sad, like, I’ll never brainstorm. I’ll never be what you want. And then when I would look back on the file later, all my dreams just struck me as idiotically funny. In part it’s transparency, their anxieties and the details.

Secrets, what’s said and what’s not said, and how that can be both the grounds for great tragedy and also often the grounds for great comedy, is an interest of mine. What people know and don’t know about themselves or about others.

The medicalized scenarios are also encounters with who knows and doesn’t know: Does the patient know anything about herself? Does the other person know? It’s kind of funny, but also kind of tragic, because what if they do know and you don’t know? What it means to have a face, in a metaphorical and real sense, and to expose it to other people; what they can see about you and what they can’t—it’s the condition of all of our connection. And because of that, it’s also totally anxiety-producing.

Exactly. It feels like you’re describing the act of writing, too.

“I will keep my thoughts private to the last minute” is kind of a description of my writing process. It’s as if the character in the dream doesn’t know that she keeps making things public. She’s like, I’m a private person in this text that’s not very private. You know what I mean? So again there’s this question of what she knows or doesn’t know about herself.

There are many different stories of love and care in The Argonauts—about Harry, about your stepson, about your baby and the erotics of the baby-mother relationship. About your own actual mother, as well as the “many-gendered mothers of my heart,” a kind of intellectual family whose words are interwoven with your own using Barthes-inspired marginal citations. And then, your thinking about language and expression feels like a central labor of love, too.

You’ve spoken about the kind of party you can create with a book by bringing together the voices of people you admire and love, and in The Argonauts in particular it feels almost musical or compositional, this collective subjectivity. I know you think a lot about form, and projects finding their right forms, and I’m curious what this form allowed you. I’m also particularly interested in the teacher-mentor/student-mentee relationship, which runs throughout your work—Christina Crosby being one such important and recurring figure.

I have a friend, Michael Snediker, who wrote this book called Queer Optimism that I really liked. After all this queer [theory about] shame and negative affect, I think he was taking up this question: Is it possible to find happiness interesting? That was kind of the theoretical undercurrent of The Argonauts. There are certain relationships, mother and child is one, teacher-student might be another, where there may be some kind of light shame blanket over them because it was [assumed that they were] just not interesting.

Sedgwick taught a class I took called Non-Oedipal Models of Psychology, and the family romance is obviously a nuclear family. The question of her class was, around the birth of psychoanalysis, what were some of the competing paradigms that might’ve taken hold instead? In The Argonauts, I wanted to put it all together: friends, people that you read, adopted family, blood relations. I didn’t really want it to be one or the other. This notion of the many-gendered mothers [from poet Dana Ward] was something that helped me do that. Cruising for intellectual mothers without quite knowing what I was doing. I don’t think I was looking for mommies, but I was looking for something nourishing that maybe wasn’t maternal, or at least not in a strict sense. I was interested in staging all of that in the book. With the marginal citations, I did really think of it as a party. All these people were helping me think this through. I wanted the book to have some sense of the rush of novelty, when you’re experiencing something you’ve never experienced before, like having a kid, but you're also relying on all the people who’ve thought about a lot of these things, who are there to help.

Okay. I think we need to talk about compatible perversities.

Okay, great. Fantastic.

There’s of course the sex. (“You pretend to use me, make a theater of heeding only your pleasure while making sure I find mine… No matter what we do, it always feels dirty without feeling lousy.”) I also appreciate how you use the phrase as a kind of framework for how different peoples’ intellectual or political styles are compatible or not. It feels like a useful way of understanding something about how we meet and miss one another.

It’s funny because when you started off asking about a decade hence, one thing the book was kind of on to, but that can get lost sometimes, is this conversation about how we [both Harry and I] were aging—moving from transition or pregnancy or hormones, whatever, to putting an emphasis on change and time. All of which is to say that I think perversities can be compatible, but then perversities are not static. We all change. The book is about the thrill of finding something in the moment, but also knowing that a moment is one moment. And then, because we all contain multitudes, what next?

I’ve always been interested in Gayle Rubin and other thinkers who ask why—beyond all kinds of repressive and puritanical histories—do we respond to other people’s preferences either with repulsion or a desire to repress or reign in or make illegal? It’s very unfashionable, I know, and I kind of grappled with this in On Freedom—I’ve heard it described in a dismissive way as the kind of pro-sex amoral lens that I grew up with and really responded to, that people now say is this libertarian ethos at its most extreme—but I still maintain, there’s much to be found in this space of using the language of compatible perversities.

In Like Love, I have this one essay on the artist Matthew Barney, where I needed to go through the whole etymology of the word “perversion” and really describe what it means and how it is different from “transgression” or “subversion.”

Like Love is your collection of conversations and essays with and about artists and writers, some of them old friends like Eileen Myles. Its title refers to Hilton Als: “Every mouth needs filling: with something wet or dry, like love, or unfamiliar and savory, like love.” It’s another kind of party.

At one point in The Argonauts you’re like, Our diagnosis is similar but our perversities aren’t compatible, about a political group that leans heavily on “comrade”-ing one another.

I think we’ve all had experiences of our perversities not being compatible with someone’s, and the kind of judgment that can rain down on that. And sometimes our perversities are compatible, but they don’t bring out the best in each other. So it’s a complicated brew.

I’m teaching a whole class on Roland Barthes this year, and I’ve been reading a lot of him in preparation. He wasn’t apolitical, but he was more analytical about politics than he was politically committed. His perversities were not compatible with bellicose language from the right or the left (Sartre and this idea of politically committed literature, the Marxist vogue and its effect on French letters). It was really not his jam. And it’s very interesting to read his analysis of that.

There’s a lot of conversation right now about what kind of new left might be born out of this insane moment. Not everyone’s styles have to be the same. What seems important is finding a container that can hold enough stylistic offshoots in a plurality so that people can feel like they’re a part of something without having to sign onto a mode of expression that feels alienating to them.

And this goes back to not disciplining difference.

Totally. It’s a cliché, but we need forms of solidarity that people can feel at home being a part of. And that means we might not agree with each other. Our perversities might not always be compatible. But you have to be able to tolerate that without expelling people from the tent.

Barthes’s mantra was “pluralize, refine, continuously,” which was something that Sedgwick took up too: “pluralize and specify.” I’ve been thinking about that a lot more seriously. It is a task of writing—there’s something in the spirit of the thing that wants to be pluralized, a lot of doors for different kinds of readers to enter through, but it has to be specific to your own experience. A few years after The Argonauts came out there were responses like, Why isn’t it about this? And why isn’t it about that? And where is this experience here? I think that’s kind of a mistake, that politically invested readers or academic readers often have this imagined ur-text that could hold everything. But that’s not quite how it works. Art is specified. But I think at its best many people can find their ways in.

I wanted to return to the chapter on sex from On Freedom (the other chapters deal with art, drugs, and climate). There are many layers of history and thinking going on in this chapter, so those curious should read it, but for our brief purposes here, I wondered if you’d be willing to say more about your own interest in staying close to questions of subjectivity and agency, even—or especially—while considering structural or external forces.

I’m still kind of hoping that chapter on sex has its day in a different time. It feels like one of the chapters that has been most reduced to me [in responses to it]—as you say, there is a lot going on—but that didn’t surprise me. There isn’t a sexual agency some young woman’s going to find that isn’t constructed around the dangers that exist. However, the Foucauldian in me was also trying to point out throughout the book that there’s never Freedom, there are degrees of freedom.

I recently had a conversation with Shon Faye about her book Love in Exile, and she said something like, Whatever happens with this book, I wrote a book in which a trans woman is the protagonist of her sex life story. She’s not someone done unto, she’s not a victim of everything that happens, she is the protagonist of this story. And it kind of moves the world, but it does come at a cost. And part of the cost is you never do it totally right. And it can literally be used against you. What I was trying to get at [in the chapter] is that price—which is so hard to pay, whether or not you publish about it or just live it—is in becoming a sexual subject who’s not absented.

I don’t mean you’re responsible for everything that happens to you, a protagonist can suffer or she can be bewildered or bad things can happen. But she’s not absented by a system that wishes her no agency. And that really is meaningful to me. I was trying in that chapter to construct an archive of writers across various feminist and queer discourses who had taught me what that sounds like. But again, it’s not for everybody.

In your chapter on drugs, you draw out the tensions between choice and compulsion, particularly in literature about addiction.

I’m really interested in these questions and paradoxes about choice and compulsion and chance, maybe, as the third leg of that stool.

I follow all the debates about heteropessimism or heteronihilism. It’s interesting because, again, there’s so much going on—you read articles about these guys watching all this porn and trying to do crazy shit to their partners that they don’t want to do. But also, if you come from a sexually perverted community, reading article after article about the horrors of anal sex, the horrors of choking, you can see how easily they bleed into this kind of feminism-never-gave-us-anything-good narrative: Now we’re just triply unsatisfied because the workplace wasn’t good, our sex lives aren’t good. The problem is there aren’t enough people in mainstream rags, The New York Times or The Washington Post or whatever, who are willing to take on the need for—what’s Gayle Rubin’s phrase?—“benign sexual variation.” There’s no conversation that there could be a benignity to any of these practices. It really bothers me. There’s just this kind of relentless doxa of what meaning is already a given, about what’s humiliating and what’s dangerous. I read these things and I think, Wow, anybody who’s reading this who likes to do this or is figuring out something about what they like just feels doubly shamed now. And that creates more self-hatred and more taboo, and more of the things that disallow sexual subjectivity.

Adding to all the Sedgwick we’ve already discussed and that lives so lovingly in The Argonauts, at one point in the book you’re reading A Dialogue On Love, her account in haibun—prose plus haiku—plus her therapist Shannon’s notes, of her treatment and relationship with him. I wondered about your interest in the psychoanalytic or therapeutic relationship.

The inception of my serious interest in literature had to do with psychoanalysis and the scene of reading as an invitation to the activities of both interpretation and transference. I think from the very start they were paired activities to me. Basically, as a reader, are you the analyst of the text or are you the patient of the text? Your reaction to it, the transference, is going to tell you something about yourself or about the world. That’s always been really alive for me.

In our very highly therapized age, I have a lot of curiosities and some phobias about the role the therapeutic has in a text. I’m wary because I see therapeutic language in writing that acts as a deadener. We’re in this great golden age of diagnosis. We’re in an acronym-bedazzled space. And yet we’re all noticing that the more diagnostics and acronyms are not corresponding to a better life for a lot of us. Ben Lerner has a new book coming out called Transcription that takes on that gap, which I think is super interesting.

In three places I can think of in my writing, I’ve let myself have a therapist speak. In Pathemata, I kind of rehearse my feelings about it when I get an assignment from a therapist to write a letter from my dead father (I’m not going to journal, I’m not going to brainstorm). But then the joke was that letter ends up as a kind of climax to the book.

So many people are in a care crisis, seeking help wherever they can find it. With Pathemata I felt like, how California am I going to let this book get? How many acupuncturists, how many gurus? I was thinking about Hervé Guibert’s book To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. He is on a quest to not die of AIDS, and he’s talking to everybody under the sun about it. I found myself noticing that every age has its search for healers, and it sounds different at different times.

In your new book The Slicks, about Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift, you investigate their shared and diverging forms and technologies, and explore fame, lyric, and why people hate women who pour and pour forth with their life-art. There’s this great part where you anatomize the new disguise donned each decade by vitriol against personal art made by women—let me just quote you:

“To consider the most recent history: in the fifties, it was tasteless, inappropriate; in the sixties, it lacked rigor; in the seventies, it was too tied up with identity politics; in the eighties, it was allied with capitalist individualism; in the nineties, it marked the loss of objective truth; in the 2000s, it was neoliberal, and had something to do with the internet; I think the complaint now has to do with reality TV, auto- everything, and the left’s failure to collectivize adequately in the face of rising inequity and autocracy—but honestly, it blurs.”

If people look back at this time and see a reality TV aesthetic, they can make their analyses. I don’t mind that reading, and we are having a hell of a difficult time trying to collectivize around climate or anything else. But to make an ethical judgment from there about the lyric “I,” which has far exceeded this particular time—and whether it’s Montaigne or Nietzsche, philosophy has had an “I”—it just becomes silly. I would resist being like, And that’s why writing in this vein is unethical and has raised us two Celsius worldwide. It theorizes a relationship between art and the world that I don’t think is useful.

It kind of relates to political perversities being compatible or not, or how to make movements. To have critics out there saying it’s stupid or bad that you like hearing about Taylor Swift’s love life when you’ve got millions of people, especially girls and women, loving it. I can’t remember where, but I feel like somewhere I heard Billy Joel saying something like, I brought my kid to the Eras Tour and I’d only ever seen this level of fandom at a Beatles concert. But back then, the girls wanted to sleep with The Beatles, whereas here they want to be Taylor Swift. That feels to me like a huge sea change, and brings us back to questions of autonomy. To choose that opportunity to denigrate what so many people are into—You want collectivization? Work with it, rather than just being like, This way lies ruin—I can’t get on board with that.

“It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.”

I’m sorry we didn’t get to talk about Jane: A Murder and The Red Parts, your books about your aunt’s 1969 murder, both of which are piercing and formally so interesting. And Bluets, a favorite of mine. You’ve said that every book you write has a ghost book behind it, a sort of totem of influence or solidarity; for Bluets it’s Wittgenstein (and Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book?). For The Argonauts, it’s of course Barthes. I love this idea of the ghost book.

A few last questions in closing, just ignore any that don’t interest you: Are you writing any poetry? What are you reading or listening to? And what are you thinking about now?

Poetry, no—if it happens, it happens. With Pathemata, it was a real pleasure to write a book that felt like it leaned more on my poetry skills—sound and details that interested me and arranging and rhythm. For some reason they just don’t have line breaks, I don’t know why.

I’ve been rereading Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story. It’s really interesting. [On the topic of] being the protagonist in your own story, she’s going back to this sexually shaming event that happened when she was 18, that also kind of made her who she became. [She’s writing decades later] and she’s Google searching, trying to find the guy’s face. She talks about herself in the third person, asking herself, Who was that and what happened and how did it change me? She’s also revisiting her own desire. It’s a really beautiful book.

You’re reminding me of how you write, in On Freedom, about self-interpretation as never static. How our stories about ourselves are always accommodating new experience, knowledge, insight, and understanding, for as long as a life.

Absolutely. If she’d written that book when she was younger, it would not be the same book. As I get older, I guess I’m more and more interested in this idea that there’s no such thing as a true story, you keep rotating your life stories to find something new in them.

I’m actually going back now to some of the psychoanalytic questions I mentioned earlier. I’m reading this book called Terrors and Experts by Adam Phillips. It’s about psychoanalysis, but it’s also about the whole project of wanting authorities. The analyst is the person presumed to know, but there are so many people that we presume to know. And yet there is value in going into what we don’t know, and what is unacceptable. About love, he writes, “There are... no experts on love. And love, whatever it is, is terror.” In love there is no such thing as an expert, precisely because it brings us face-to-face with the things that frighten us the most. ♦

What is love? How is it best sought, fallen into, lived? What do we express through love, and what of lust? Longing? Who are we in love, and how does love make us? Why do we lose the ones we love, and how do we come to find we’ve lost ourselves?

What to make of this thing we flailingly, failingly call love? Falling Hard attends to the ways we come together and come apart to ask what it means to love—well and badly; romantically, platonically; greedily, freely, and carelessly; unconditionally or conditions required—and to explore the questions most fundamental to love’s labors.