![]() ![]() So she sends him a passage from Roland Barthes, one that explains that saying ‘I love you’ is like ‘the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.’ The name – the words – are the same, but the meaning of them is remade every time they are spoken. Nelson says to her partner Harry: ‘What’s your pleasure? You asked, then stuck around for an answer.’ describes telling Harry she loves him, and then feeling ‘feral with vulnerability’. It is a memoir about a relationship, it is literary criticism, it is gender theory, queer theory, ontology, it is specific and universal, creative and critical. ![]() ![]() It is a love story that refuses to be boundaried. That first day, all I could think was this: these words are unflinching and beautiful at the same time, in equal measure, a combination that until that moment, I hadn’t realised was possible. I knew that reading it had shifted something in me, but I wouldn’t understand what that was until years later, on my fifth or sixth reading. The first time I read The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, I was sitting in my bedroom in my hometown in Sydney, Australia. ![]()
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