‘You pass as a guy; I, as pregnant. Our waiter cheerfully tells us about his family, expresses delight in ours. On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more “male”, mine, more and more “female”. But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.’

For our second meeting of the Longform Society we’ll be looking at Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, an exhilarating, genre-defying work of feminism, queer theory and memoir. Strikingly original and immediately beloved, Nelson’s unique writing effortlessly moves between compelling literary criticism and memoir. Using selected extracts we’ll discuss her philosophical questions of queer family-making, art, literary history, sexual politics and more.