The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson is a memoir that takes itself seriously by a writer who takes herself seriously. Nelson writes extensively about philosophers and lectures she has attended and given. This is not the type of book a blog devoted to smut about naked sex slaves (which I write) and Regency romances (which I read) would typically address.
But it's my blog and I get to do what I want.
To the extent that The Argonauts is about anything concrete in terms of plot, it's about Nelson's relationship with her husband, Harry, a transgender man (or, more accurately, a nonbinary person who was born a biological woman and transitioned to a biological male) who started taking testosterone around the same time that Nelson started to take hormones to assist with getting pregnant. The love story between Nelson and Harry, although not very detailed, is very sweet. It begins with a Seinfeld-like scene where, for an uncomfortably long time after they start dating, Nelson is not sure what pronouns to use to refer to Harry. (He/him, she eventually learns.) In due course they get married, Nelson becomes a stepmother to Harry's son, and Nelson and Harry have a child together. The book mentions all this, but devotes much more time to Deep Thoughts (which I do not mean snidely).
Nevertheless, many times as I was reading the book I rolled my eyes and thought, "This is a Mommy blog." Nelson writes about how pregnancy changed her body, about how giving birth was really, really hard, about how special it is to be a mother of a newborn. All in beautiful prose, but still . . .
Which leads to the question, why do I roll my eyes at mommy blogs? I myself am a mommy -- well, now that my kids are older a mom (picture this being said with an eye roll by my teen). I am the category of mommy who was pregnant and who gave birth and thought it was really special to be with my newborn.
And yet, I have no desire to read about anyone else's experiences with this. Maybe because it is all so common. I can compare and contrast Nelson's pregnancy and childbirth experience to my own, but I don't find doing so particularly interesting. Even though Nelson writes very nice prose, she doesn't have anything new to say about these things.
Does it matter? I love reading memoirs, but isn't it also true that one person's early years as the child of an alcoholic are pretty much like another person's? Certainly Regency romances have only a handful of interchangeable plots and stock characters, and I read them all the time.
I think, in the end, it's part of the human condition that the bond between a mother and her infant is intensely personal and intensely interesting to the mother who is by necessity all-consumed by the bond -- but it is also so universal that reading about the experience is like looking at Facebook pictures of a blizzard. It snowed! Yeah, I know, I can look out my window and see that.
Is this opinion sexist? Probably, yes. But the good news is, you don't have to read my naked sex slave smut if you're not interested, and I don't have to read about your childbirth experience if I'm not interested. To each her own.
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