The title of Maggie Nelson’s 2015 memoir The Argonauts comes from the Greek legend of the Argonauts, a band of 50 heroes who went with their leader, Jason, in the ship Argo to fetch the Golden Fleece. The book explores Nelson’s relationship with her husband, artists Harry Dodge; the birth of their first child; and Dodge’s gender transition. In titling the book, Nelson was inspired by French critic Roland Barthes’s comparison of the act of loving another person to the Argonauts’ gradual replacing of the Argo with new pieces “so that they ended with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either its name or its form.”
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