What I found deeply attractive about the book was an honest sense of struggle, not just with maintaining an identity while so much of the self is changing, but with the close attention to the kinds of language that inform identity projects. And how that language is overwhelmed by bloody biology in the struggle. This is a very visceral, physical book, and not just the kink sex and the gender transition details, but with bodies dying and being born and giving birth.
For most of the early parts of this book I carried the image of the narrator trapped in a theory-maze and only in the immediacy and urgency of real, physical things does she see the thread that points a way out:
...in Iggy's first year of life, Winnicott was the only child psychologist who retained any interest or relevance for me. Klein's morbid infant sadism and bad breast, Freud's blockbuster Oedipal saga and freighted fort/da, Lacan's heavy-handed Imaginary and Symbolic -- suddenly none seemed irreverent enough to address the situation of being a baby, of caretaking a baby. 'Do castration and the Phallus tell us the deep Truths of Western culture or just the truth of how things are and might not alwways be?' (Elizabeth Weed) It astonishes and shames me to think that I spent years finding such questions not only comprehensible, but compelling.
In the face of such phallocentric gravitas, I find myself drifting into a delinquent, anti-interpretive mood. 'In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.' (Susan Sontag) But even an erotics feels too heavy. I don't want an eros, or a hermeneutics, of my baby. Neither is dirty, neither is mirthful, enough.
While there are these moments of clarity there are also a few moments when the book reveals some of the panic and fear that helped build Maggie's defensive theory-maze in the first place. There's the story about her deciding whether or not to accept a speaking invite from Biola University, an Evangelical school in LA. She goes all top-student and pores over the university marketing and position material to understand the implications of accepting this invitation and associating her carefully maintained queer identity with the Biola brand. The big revelation, it turns out, is that the school's definition of its conservative sexual code looks like just another spin on garden-variety kink and Maggie -- who is used to negotiated rules for sex -- finds herself surprisingly cool with the no-sex outside marriage rules, even if it isn't her flavor. What she can not abide, it turns out, is the assumptive and condescending treatment toward evolutionary theorists who are described as having "inadequate origin models". Maggie's deeply felt allyship with an amoeba past was what ultimately kept her from associating in any capacity with Biola. Fair enough. That attitude toward evolutionary theory rubs me the wrong way too but the identity fragility that requires this level of heavily researched second-guessing just seems exhausting to me. I get it -- if the twitterverse matters to your brand you gotta do the work. But even the idea of stepping outside of this polished identity space, while deeply desired in other parts of the book, is not considered here.
Another moment that seemed reflexively retrograde was the moment after a nuanced and tender description of the narrator's father (who seemed "the vessel of all earthly joy") when she switches to her attempt to have a grown-up conversation with her mother about why she left the father by having an affair so she could escape and "have a chance at joy." Maggie asks why blow up the marriage?
"'He told me that I could work outside the home if I wanted to, so long as his shirts still got ironed and were ready for work the next day,' my mother told me. The feminist in me was unmoved. 'Couldn't you have told him you didn't want to iron his shirts, and taken it from there?'
The coldness of that answer made me sad. Of course if the mother was a different person -- a modern day queer theorist for example -- that's a pretty natural reply. But the unmoved feminist seems to miss what for me was the point of this book, that knowing exactly who you are is hard and in its best versions involves other people. Clearly Maggie herself has so much pain around the destruction of her family that finding any grip on generosity here -- seeing mother's own incomplete becoming and feelings of despair -- is maybe not in the cards yet for the daughter. But it feels to me like Maggie's flip take-it-from-there reply is a deck plank on the old identity ship that's probably due for replacement.
Where book's narrative really shines, however, is when Maggie is doing the work, the writing work and the relationship work, which it turns out here are completely intertwined. A pivotal moment in the entire project is when Maggie gives the first draft of this Argonauts book to her partner Harry. Harry is very private and extremely cautious about how he is presented in the world -- and that might be a large understatement. Maggie wants to say true things about herself and those include things about Harry. As she sits down to do line edits with an agitated Harry, Maggie says: "How can a book be a free expression and a negotiation?" which is really the center of the problem. Whose book is it? Whose identity is it? Who has the final say?
Harry doesn't like how dark the book is and says: "...why can't you just write something that will bear adequate witness to me, to us, to our happiness?"
All Maggie can really offer in return is her best effort. She replies, "Because I do not yet understand the relationship between writing and happiness, or writing and holding."
That seems to be not only enough, but exactly what works, especially the strategy of pulling Harry into the process. In fact the final published version has parts written by Harry. To me some of the most moving paragraphs are in his voice, I'm thinking especially of the scenes where he says his final farewell to his birth mother who he has only barely known.
It turns out that the genius of this book is this collaboration, the fusion of Harry and Iggy's stories into Maggie's identity. This work is beautiful and it comes at the expense of her own precious, carefully constructed and fiercely defended personhood, but somehow she seems more clearly herself in the plural.
The process clearly frightens her but she gets far enough into this project of writing about her people to say:
...I have also never been less interested in arguing for the rightness, much less the righteousness, of any particular position or orientation. 'What other reason is there for writing than to be a traitor to one's own reign, traitor to one's own sex, to one's class, to one's majority? To be a traitor to writing.' (Deluze/Parnet)
A traitor to the carefully constructed self.
What better metaphor for this this moment of shared identity than the band of Greek warriors in the book's title, a fiercely bound elite unit who have shared everything and suffered everything together and won everything together. What is Aristotle's famous quote? 'What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies?' I think this kind of shared bond is so hard to build and keep renewing. This is what it is to be an Argonaut.
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