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We're pleased to announce the first major renovation of Pioneer Works! To accommodate the first phase of our construction, we're temporarily relocating to 133 Imlay Street opening in Spring 2022.

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Friday, September 12, 2025, from 7–9 PM

Raúl de Nieves, Tega Brain, and Sam Lavigne

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What to make of this thing we flailingly, failingly call love? These conversations attend 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—as writers explore the questions most fundamental to love’s labors. Edited by Lucy McKeon.

 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 

 by your bedside and a stack of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall. Does it get any better? 

 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 

 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. 

 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, 

. 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 

, 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.”

Lucy McKeon

—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 

), 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.

Maggie Nelson

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, 

. 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?

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. 

 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 

, 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 

, which is better known for its other qualities. In 

 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 

 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, 

 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.

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.

There are many different stories of love and care in 

—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.

Falling Hard