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Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir
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About This Book
Stunning for her daring originality, the author of Negroland gives us what she calls "a temperamental autobiography," comprised of visceral, intimate fragments that fuse criticism and memoir. Margo Jefferson constructs a nervous system with pieces of different lengths and tone, conjoining arts writing (poem, song, performance) with life writing (history, psychology). The book's structure is determined by signal moments of her life, those that trouble her as well as those that thrill and restore. In this nervous system: - The sounds of a black spinning disc of a 1950's jazz LP as intimate and instructive as a parent's voice. - The muscles and movements of a ballerina, spliced with those of an Olympic runner: template for what a female body could be. - Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy finds her way into the art of Kara Walker and the songs of C�cile McLorin Salvant. - Bing Crosby and Ike Turner become alter egos. - W.E.B. DuBois and George Eliot meet illicitly, as he appropriates lines from her story "The Hidden Veil" to write his famous "behind the veil" passages in The Souls of Black Folk. - The words of multiple others (writers, singers, film characters, friends, family) act as prompts and as dialogue.The fragments of this brilliant book, while not neglecting family, race, and class, are informed by a kind of aesthetic drive: longing, ecstasy, or even acute ambivalence. Constructing a nervous system is Jefferson's relentlessly galvanizing mis en scene for unconventional storytelling as well as a platform for unexpected dramatis personae.
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Reviews
"Jefferson's unique perspective and relentless honesty and self-examination ensure that there's something worthwhile on every page."
"Jefferson writes about craving 'license' as a young woman, dispensation to play 'with styles and personae deemed beyond my range.' She has...grabbed hold of that permission slip and torn it to shreds."
"What's left is something awe-inspiring, but more fractious, more prone to false starts and massive leaps."
"Constructing a Nervous System is a diary that often stops to directly address the reader."
"Her narration is kaleidoscopic; she forgoes chronology and exposition in favor of tumbling fragments and shifting personae."
"Most intriguing, though, is Jefferson's self-aware refusal to write from a critic's remove: when a discussion of Willa Cather's writing tempts her to launch into lofty analysis, she interjects 'STOP!"
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