Maggie Nelson On ‘Like Love’, Melding the Personal with the Academic, and The Eras Tour
Words: Jemima Skala
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The news that Maggie Nelson, beloved writer of works spanning forms from poetry to memoir, was releasing a new essay collection this year was greeted by a flurry of excitement in the literary world. Like Love would be another book to add to the Maggie Nelson canon, which includes The Argonauts, a memoir about parenting, queer families and desire that redefined what a memoir could do and look like, and Bluets, a meditation in 240 paragraphs on Nelson’s obsession with the colour blue, but also about the end of one of her relationships.
Like Love draws together various essays, interviews and pieces from over nearly 20 years, featuring characters as various as queer theorist Eve Sedgwick, songwriter Lhasa de Sala, and even Björk.
Nelson’s writing has always seamlessly melded deep philosophical thinking with the personal. Her frankness about her own feelings, thought processes, experiences and shortcomings is what makes her one of the most perennially interesting writers working today. Like Love, in its great timespan, offers an insight into the person that she was and is outside of her books, revealing concentric circles of themes and preoccupations as she writes them.
In the wake of its publication, I exchanged some email questions with Nelson, to discuss her new collection, how her work is being read in new contexts, and the stage adaptation of Bluets at the Royal Court.
In the process of putting together the collection, what was it like to revisit your writing from that far back? How did you select what would go in?
It was great fun. I laid out most of the pieces I’d written on other people over the past 20 years and tried to pick the most substantive and interesting ones. Then I had the thought that some conversations should go in as well. After I made my picks I laid it all out chronologically, and it made sense. I was really happy with it.
Reading it, I started to notice a real repeated and intertwining web of references. Is this something you’ve observed? How has this morphed and grown over time?
Yes, I noticed many themes recurring, and many references repeating. It makes sense, as I have thought alongside some of the same people - living and dead - for many years now. I think that, over time, new figures come in and add to the old stable - which is cool, you know, make new friends and keep the old.
What’s it like to be putting together a collection of writing? It feels very serious and retrospective which is not how I usually think about your work (usually it feels more playful and present to me, even in works like On Freedom).
That’s funny, Like Love feels very playful to me, maybe because writing individual pieces on art is something I consider “playtime” as compared to writing longer books. Also most of the artists I am writing about are very playful, full of humor and verve and weirdness - sometimes more humour and verve and weirdness than I have on offer. So it feels to me like a party I’m grateful to be at.
I particularly loved your essay eulogising Prince in this collection. How important, if at all, is music to your work, and are there any artists currently that you feel excited about?
Right now all the records by my turntable are by friends - Jeff Parker’s “The New Breed,” Tara Jane O’Neil’s “The Cool Cloud of Okayness,” Johanna Hedva’s “Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House.” I also like PJ Harvey’s recent album “I Inside the Old Year Dying.” I think what Taylor Swift is doing with the Eras tour is super interesting, actually. I swing a lot of ways.
Your work has always been praised for how it melds the personal with the academic; the academic always is so intent on objectivity and not letting the personal in. Do you see these two as dichotomies, or complementary?
Yeah, I don’t see these modes as opposites, though I’m aware that a lot of people do. Most of my writing heroes swing between these poles pretty seamlessly. The notion of objectivity isn’t an important one for me, nor do I think that so-called academic writing has any stronger grasp on “truth” than personal writing. I feel a real flow between abstraction and particularity, between idea and thing - always have.
I’m thinking particularly about On Freedom with this question: what do you think about writing as activism, or writing intertwining with activism?
I don’t think of writing as activism, though certainly writing can have political manifestations or be put to activist use. But I think the two realms involve a different set of tools and a different sort of labor and a different set of priorities. As the writer Hanif Abdurraquib, who grew up with activist parents, once put it (and I’m paraphrasing, so forgive me Hanif, if I’ve got it wrong), it’s almost an insult to the labor of activism to say that your writing is activism, because activism is such hard work and writing isn’t it. Anyway, I feel sure that nothing good has or would come from me as a writer if I thought or hoped my writing was activism. (Which isn’t to say writing doesn’t or can’t change the world.)
You write in one of the early essays in Like Love about being a ‘female’ writer and on people getting an insight into the female experience from your books. How do you feel about that now?
I think you’re thinking of a conversation in Like Love with my friend, the writer Brian Blanchfield - but I don’t think your summary of it is quite correct. Brian asks me, “are you comfortable with such assessments that determine your work is where one might ‘learn’ about female experience?,” and I respond: “Honestly I’m pretty comfortable with such assessments, even though I know a lot of people wouldn’t be. I mean, it’s preposterous to think that there’s something called ‘female experience’ or ‘femaleness’ in which all women share. But I’m not one of those people who thinks ‘I want to be an artist, god damn it, not a female artist!’ This is likely a result of the fact that I’ve been lucky enough to come up in a time and place in which being called a female artist did not assign you to any ghetto; or, maybe more to the point, if it did, I was proud of the ghetto, and unafraid of its grouping. I mean, if Eileen Myles wants to call Jane a ‘deep, dark female masterpiece,’ I’ll take it. . . I have also always felt strongly that girlhood and femaleness, as well as transgender identifications of all stripes, are as fundamental to the human experience as the so-called straight white male subject and all his trappings. So when I hear the word ‘female’ applied to my work, I almost hear it as ‘human,’ even though I know for others the word works in an opposite fashion.” Sorry to quote myself so extensively, but this really matters. What matters is that I’m talking about how I feel about other people’s assessments of my writing, which is not the same as me making claims about it myself. I’ve always been pretty allergic to essentialism, but these days I’m probably even warier when folks start talking freely about “female experience,” in that it can sometimes be code for a trans-exclusionary or reactionary modality, which I stand firmly against.
Re-reading The Argonauts, I’m struck by a passage early on where you distinguish in Harry’s film By Hook or By Crook, the two main characters calling each other ‘he’ but ‘she’ in the outside world, and the difference between usages of certain words, like it doesn’t mean the same thing when everyone says it. This feels particularly radical in today’s climate.
Yes, well, as a wise queer theorist once put it to me, “pronouns are not ontology.” Others may differ on this, but this feels true to me.
How have your thoughts around language and gender evolved since The Argonauts was published?
I think after many years of being super interested in my peers and elders, I’m probably more interested now in young people, in part because I have kids and am around kids a lot - both my kids’ friends and the college students I teach - so I’m riveted by how they are remaking the world.
There’s something in the air at the moment with your work finding lots of different new homes - not only Like Love but also the Royal Court adaptation of Bluets. What’s it like to see your work finding new homes in new forms?
The Royal Court production was super cool. The cast was amazing and the technical execution of it was innovative and dazzling. My book has a very different pace and vibe than that of the production - especially to me! - but that’s as it should be; they are two distinct works of art. I’m very grateful that Katie Mitchell wanted to work with the book, and that so many people gave the production their attention.
Images: Sarah St Clair Renard and Harry Dodge