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Maggie Nelson: I think that happiness or joy gets a really bad rap in writing land. People are always saying happiness kills creativity, or all happiness is the same, or there's no way of expressing happiness without it being glib. So the challenge was to see if all those things were true.At the same time, in queer theory, there's been a long, at least 30-year conversation between an optimistic and pessimistic stance. Are you going to emphasize shame, trauma, mourning? Or are you going to emphasize pleasure, utopian thinking? I'm simplifying, of course—on many levels, these stances include each other. I was interested in that theoretical conversation, as well as an autobiographical conversation.The thing about happiness is that it's only produced in the context of knowing what aren't happy feelings. That part at the end with the stalker episode, and with the logic of paranoia, I was interested in that. Happiness doesn't come without its specters, so it was never a book that was pure flight.
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Once you engage words like mother or family, the machinery of them is so ginormous that I have my own phobic relationships going into those things. The machinery that wants to have a narrative of growing up, this "Oh, once you were like this, and now, you've 'become a mother' or 'generated a family'"—I'm not interested in that narrative arc. It's a narrative that's almost irresistible for most people, perhaps unconsciously so.Also, it's difficult to write about people you live with, so I thought that would be too hard to undertake. But we've managed to get through it over here.
When you talk back to that dismissive discourse, you can feel frozen in a reactionary mode, like, "Goddamn it, the placenta should be interesting to everybody." But that's not a very interesting place to be for any length of time. So, I think I did in the book what I would try to do with any writing, which is to give testimony to lived experience in the most interesting language or way of thinking that I could find.
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It's the way that I write and the way that I think. The editing process of any book I write—there's an art to it because no one wants to feel like they're plunked into some huge quote. When I'm reading the work of others, I feel a palpable difference of stakes between when I'm reading somebody's words and when I'm reading a quote. And I often don't want to read the quote. I want to read what the author has to say. But as an avid reader, and a lover of so many people that I'm quoting, I really want to use their words.So, a lot of that process involves pushing yourself not to use more of the quote than you need to, only quoting when it's exceptionally important that it be in their words, and also doing something with their words, as opposed to trying to make them stand in for something that you didn't think you could say.
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You said after writing Bluets that your blue wasn't your blue anymore after you wrote about it, and that you felt differently about it. Did writing The Argonauts change how you felt about anything?I feel like I'm in drag as a mother and in drag as a married person. But that's OK because I think it would be weird and probably self-deluded otherwise. –Maggie Nelson
That's a good question. It would be too bad if I drifted away from my family the way I drifted from the color blue [ laughs]. But I don't feel like that. What's interesting about writing autobiographically is that you kind of shoot some wad somewhere and feel like you're done. But then our lives are our lives, and similar issues keep coming up in different guises.I guess I felt on board with making certain aspects of my family public at this moment because it de-privatizes family in a way that probably has good political ramifications for our future. Even if writing the book made me feel more settled about certain issues, I didn't write it to settle into a privatized family and stop other struggles.Is that feeling related to the part in The Argonauts when you say that, while going around talking to people as a writer, you sometimes feel as though you're "in drag as a memoirist"? Did you feel that way about writing this book as well?
In drag as something [laughs]?Yes.
I think being in drag is a great thing, so I think I resist, say, a collapsed biographical reading of this book as being about "becoming a mother," because of the way that the phrase preserves this role—it has a static-ness. I just don't relate to it. So, when people ask, "What's the biggest change of becoming a mother?"—which I've been asked in many interviews at this point—somehow I can't feel cheery. There are portals we go through in life that do change us, but how do we recognize those and pay honor to them, while also insisting on a sense of identity that's more fugitive than having, like, stations at the cross? So I would say, sure, I feel like I'm in drag as a mother and in drag as a married person. But that's OK because I think it would be weird and probably self-deluded otherwise.
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I'm a little flabbergasted, but also not at all surprised, that so many interviews have involved people asking what the biggest change has been in becoming a mother. I feel as though, in that question, there's a fixed idea about what motherhood is, and what mothers are or should be.It's not just a cliché that spending a lot of time around small people makes you think differently. –Maggie Nelson
What I don't like about it, too, among other things, is that a lot gets shoveled into mother in this culture. When we say "becoming a mother," there can be this whole narrative behind it, like, "I used to be this selfish bachelorette/little girl and now I'm a grownup who cares for other people." There's a disciplinary aspect of "becoming a mother," a disciplinary aspect of shoving all care onto a mother, not to mention a truly wicked disciplinary aspect of punishing mothers who can't "adequately provide" for their children.At the same time, there are things like a sense of time or a sense of mortality. It's not just a cliché that spending a lot of time around small people makes you think differently. So you have to figure out how to deflate without dismissing. You can deflate the ideology of the thing without dismissing real feelings or observations that come with that experience.You mention talking about the X-Men with Harry, and you say that what you hate about crappy fiction is that it "purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions." What kinds of fiction do you like, then?
I've had conversations with fiction-writer friends who basically think it's the most incendiary claim in the whole book [laughs].
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I did, I really did! I don't think I had that in there originally, but then I put it in later. What I've said in response to fiction friends was, "Look how much fiction there is all through this book, whether it's Beckett's Molloy in the opening paragraph, or Alice Munro—there's so much in there, so that speaks for itself, in a way." I probably read fiction the least of any genre, but the fiction that I love tends to be more conceptual. I do read current people—oftentimes my friends, sometimes not—but I also really love fiction from the last century: I love Henry James, I love Virginia Woolf. I think I'm an impatient reader on a sentence-by-sentence level. I think that some avid fiction readers like plot and structure and character development so much that they can overlook weak sentences. I'm not one of those people [laughs]. If I come across the third bad metaphor, I'm like, "I'm out."Yes!
What about you?I think I share your sympathies. Unless the book's come highly recommended by someone I trust, I'll pick it up and read a few sentences from the middle. If those sentences move me, and pull me in, and they don't feel hackneyed or false, then I can keep reading.
When I lived in New York, my mom used to take me to Broadway shows when she came to town, and I remember that every time the lights went down—which, to a lot of people, is the magical moment—I felt horrified that, when they came back up, everyone was going to be pretending. The theater I liked was more like Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater, where all of those issues of performativity were foregrounded, at play. I shouldn't even say all this because, again, this is going to be more contentious than anything else.Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is available from Graywolf Press in bookstores and online.Follow R. O. Kwon on Twitter.