Description
| Author/Contributor(s): | Jefferson, Margo |
| Publisher: | Vintage |
| Date: | 4/11/2023 |
| Binding: | Paperback |
| Condition: | NEW |
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 Prize-winning critic and memoirist Margo Jefferson has lived in the thrall of a cast of others—her parents and maternal grandmother,jazz luminaries, writers, artists, athletes, and stars. These are the figures who thrilland trouble her, and who have made up her sense of self as a person and as a her much-anticipated follow-up to Negroland, Jefferson brings these figures to lifein a memoir of stunning originality, a performance of the elements that compriseand 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 criticismthat she is known for, fragments of the family members she grieves for, and signalmoments from her life, as well as the words of those who have peopled her past andaccompanied her in her solitude, dramatized here like never before. Bing Crosbyand Ike Turner are among the author’s alter egos. The sounds of a jazz LP emergeas the intimate and instructive sounds of a parent’s voice. W. E. B. Du Bois andGeorge Eliot meet illicitly. The muscles and movements of a ballerina are splicedwith those of an Olympic runner, becoming a template for what a black femalebody can be.
The result is a wildly innovative work of depth and stirring beauty. It is definedby 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 thefissures at the center of American cultural life.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.