The Argonauts

by Maggie Nelson

And I have long known that the moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you.

There is no control group. I don’t even want to talk about “female sexuality” until there is a control group. And there never will be.

To be fair, writing well about children is tough. You know why? They’re not that interesting. What is interesting is that despite the mind-numbing boredom that constitutes 95 percent of child rearing, we continue to have them.”

That’s what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction—it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed a narrative full of false choices, and hooked you on them, rendering you less able to see out, to get out.

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.

Babies grow in a helix of hope and fear; gestating draws one but deeper into the spiral. It isn’t cruel in there, but it’s dark.

Privilege saturates, privilege structures.

One only has to read interviews with outstanding women to hear them apologizing. But I don’t intend to denigrate the power of apology: I keep in my sorry when I really mean it.

As the baby might say to its mother, we might say to death: I forget you, but you remember me. I wonder if I’ll recognize it, when I see it again.