Paris Review - Maggie Nelson, The Art of Nonfiction No. 13

Across three decades and more than a dozen books⁠—including the narrative documentary poem Jane: A Murder (2005); the lyrical sequence Bluets (2009), about heartbreak, pain, and the color blue; and the assemblage of essays Like Love (2024)⁠—Maggie Nelson has cast her relentlessly curious and sometimes maddeningly scholastic eye on love, art, narrative, embodiment, and form. Even her most academic writing has the bright hue of the personal. Her critical work assimilates a vast spectrum of sources in its forensic approach to monumental themes such as cruelty and freedom; almost all her books straddle genres, sometimes in the span of a single page. She remains best known for The Argonauts (2015), a slender, allusive work of “autotheory” about her relationship with her partner, the gender nonconforming artist and writer Harry Dodge, whom she married in 2008, and her pregnancy in 2011 with their son Iggy. The book earned ardent praise for its rangy, capacious account of finding love and pro

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• Carmen Lau