Constructing a Nervous System

A Memoir

Author: Margo Jefferson

The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and acclaimed author of Negroland boldly and brilliantly fuses cultural analysis and memoir to probe race, class, family and art.

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Summary

The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and acclaimed author of Negroland boldly and brilliantly fuses cultural analysis and memoir to probe race, class, family and art.

Description

Taking in the jazz and blues icons whom Jefferson idolised as a child in the 1950s, ideas of what the female body could be - as incarnated by trailblazing Black dancers and athletes - Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy reimagined in the artworks of Kara Walker, white supremacy in the novels of Willa Cather, and more, this breathtakingly eloquent account is both a critique and a vindication of the constructed self.

Critic Reviews

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
Margo Jefferson is the rare memoirist who is always daring the reader to keep up... It is impossible not to be stirred by her odes to fellow black American strivers of excellence Observer
Constructing a Nervous System compresses memoir and cultural criticism into one slim, explosive volume, and in doing so the Pulitzer Prize-winning author makes both forms new. Hers is a wry, intimate portrayal of a passionate and intellectual woman coming to maturity... Jefferson has that rare ability to make her reader see things anew. -- Margie Orford Spectator
Part autobiography, part cultural criticism, [Margo Jefferson] reminds us that the rules for how we structure memory, and how we tell our stories, are not immutable. -- Enuma Okoro Financial Times
Lithe and always surprising... [Jefferson] paints a remarkable portrait of herself as a singular kind of performer New Statesman

About the Author

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Margo Jefferson was a theatre and book critic for Newsweek and the New York Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, Vogue, New York magazine and New Republic. She is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts. She is the author of Negroland - shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award - and On Michael Jackson.

More on this Book

The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and acclaimed author of Negroland boldly and brilliantly fuses cultural analysis and memoir to probe race, class, family and art. Taking in the jazz and blues icons whom Jefferson idolised as a child in the 1950s, ideas of what the female body could be - as incarnated by trailblazing Black dancers and athletes - Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy reimagined in the artworks of Kara Walker, white supremacy in the novels of Willa Cather, and more, this breathtakingly eloquent account is both a critique and a vindication of the constructed self.