A genre-bending memoir, offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making. Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson's insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book. Maggie Nelson is a poet, art critic, and nonfiction author of books such as The Art of Cruelty, a study of avant-garde art and two memoirs about the abduction and murder of her aunt: Jane: a Murder, and The Red Parts: a Memoir. She teaches in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts and lives in Los Angeles, California.