Constructing a Nervous System

Electric [Jefferson] takes vital risks, tosses away rungs of the ladder as it climbs, and offers an indispensable, rollicking account of the enchantments, pleasures, costs, and complexities of imagin[ing] and interpret[ing] what had not imagined you -- Maggie Nelson * author of The Argonauts * Margo Jefferson has created a startling and digressive form of auto-analysis... an intimate view of the aesthetic and political landscape of American culture and the secrets, longing, withholding and disavowal necessary to imagine oneself inside it and ward off its damage -- Saidiya Hartman * author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments * She knows everything and has felt it all deeply. If you want to know who we are and where we've been, read Margo Jefferson -- Edmund White * author of A Previous Life * Margo Jefferson is one of our most nuanced thinkers on the intersections of race, class, and feminism. Her latest Constructing a Nervous System is especially alive is both spiky and supple; jagged -- Cathy Park Hong * New York Times bestselling author of Minor Feelings * This is one of the most imaginative-and therefore moving-memoirs I have ever read -- Vivian Gornick * author of Fierce Attachments * Jefferson is as precise and sensitive as ever, nonpareil in her scope and ability to synthesize the circus of traditions, arcs, and performances that make up a life -- Most Anticipated Books of 2022 * Vulture * This is a moving portrait of the life of a brilliant African American woman's mind. Margo Jefferson is so real, her sensibility so literary, her learning such a joy. The gifts of reading her are many -- Darryl Pickney * author of Sold and Gone * A tour-de-force of personal narrative -- Keziah Weir * Vanity Fair *