Description
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR From one of our most nuanced thinkers on the intersections of race class and feminism Cathy Park Hong New York Times bestselling author of Minor Feelings comes a memoir as electric as the title suggests Maggie Nelson author of On Freedom
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR The New York Times TIME Magazine Oprah Daily The New Yorker Washington Post Vulture Buzzfeed Publishers Weekly
The Pulitzer Prizewinning critic and memoirist Margo Jefferson has lived in the thrall of a cast of othersher parents and maternal grandmother jazz luminaries writers artists athletes and stars These are the figures who thrill and trouble her and who have made up her sense of self as a person and as a writer In her muchanticipated followup to Negroland Jefferson brings these figures to life in a memoir of stunning originality a performance of the elements that comprise and occupy the mind of one of our foremost critics
In Constructing a Nervous System Jefferson shatters her self into pieces and recombines them into a new and vital apparatus on the page fusing the criticism that she is known for fragments of the family members she grieves for and signal moments from her life as well as the words of those who have peopled her past and accompanied her in her solitude dramatized here like never before Bing Crosby and Ike Turner are among the authors alter egos The sounds of a jazz LP emerge as the intimate and instructive sounds of a parents voice W E B Du Bois and George Eliot meet illicitly The muscles and movements of a ballerina are spliced with those of an Olympic runner becoming a template for what a black female body can be
The result is a wildly innovative work of depth and stirring beauty It is defined by fractures and dissonance longing and ecstasy and a persistent searching Jefferson interrogates her own self as well as the act of writing memoir and probes the fissures at the center of American cultural life
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