Maggie Nelson: ‘People write to me to let me know that, in case I missed it, there are only two genders’

The author of the much acclaimed The Argonauts talks about unconventional family life, the brutal murder of her aunt and violating her own privacy in her work

From the moment last year when The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson’s most recent book, was published in her native US, it was much talked-about, fervently recommended, highly fashionable. A blend of autobiographical writing, comment and quotation, it is about many things, one of which is love. The book tells how Nelson, after years of painful solitude, begins a joyful relationship with the artist Harry Dodge – she is amazed to come to terms with “the nearly exploding fact that I’ve so obviously gotten everything I’d ever wanted, everything there was to get. Handsome, brilliant, quick-witted, articulate, forceful, you.”

She relates how she and Dodge have great sex (“was his sexual power, which I already felt to be immense, a kind of spell I’d fallen under…?”), move in together and get married. Setting up home, they aren’t just a couple but a family: with them is Dodge’s three-year-old son from a previous relationship. Nelson, once dismissive of “breeders”, suddenly becomes an adoring step-parent, folding a young child’s tiny clothes. It soon emerges that this is a tale of more than one love. The book charts Nelson’s pregnancy, the birth of her son Iggy, and her first experiences as a mother: “It isn’t like a love affair. It is a love affair,” she writes of her and Iggy. “Or rather, it is romantic, erotic and consuming … I have my baby, and my baby has me.”

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