It told the story of Nelson’s love affair with the artist Harry Dodge, with whom she had a son named Iggy. Whatever else it was, The Argonauts was beautiful. But I am not talking about the specter of difficulty I am talking about clarity, novelty, and - forgive me - beauty.

So why write an academic book? Why fill chapters with ponderous quotations from writers who are, at the end of the day, talking about something else? Why hide in the endnotes arguments that could have appeared out in the open? I am in full agreement with Nelson’s observation that “people read much more challenging things than they are given credit for,” as she once said regarding the success of her 2015 memoir, The Argonauts. Maggie Nelson could etch sentences into a grain of rice if she wanted to. But Maggie Nelson is a Guggenheim Fellow, a MacArthur Fellow, the best-selling author of nine (now ten) books, the most recent of which earned her wide recognition outside both academia and letters. In doing so, Nelson says we’ll be engaging in what the French philosopher Michel Foucault called “practices of freedom” - careful, patient experiments with what freedom might look like in everyday life with often conflicting results. What they say is this: If freedom-minded people are to rid ourselves of “the habits of paranoia, despair, and policing” that Nelson believes to be menacing the left - from the MeToo movement to climate nihilism - we must learn to sit with ambiguity, risk, and indeterminacy. Its lyrical subtitle - “Four Songs of Care and Constraint” - is an overpromise the chapters are “songs” exclusively in the sense that they have musical names: “Art Song,” “The Ballad of Sexual Optimism,” “Drug Fugue,” and “Riding the Blinds.” In fact, they are bits of straightforward academic criticism. On Freedom, the new essay collection from the poet and memoirist Maggie Nelson, sits squarely in this genre.

I mean it as a rightful acknowledgment that scholars are workers, and like other workers, they have an inalienable right to mediocrity. The famous abstruseness of what we call “theory” is usually not an effect of intellectual sophistication more often, it’s just someone doing their job. For most scholars - I speak from recovery - academic writing is a professional genre, not a literary one, more akin to a legal memo than a novel.

Maggie nelson blue