Not a memoir, and that matters.

Genre first, because every argument about this book starts in the wrong place. It gets shelved as memoir and reviewed as memoir, and the reviews then complain that it withholds, that the chronology is loose, that we don't get enough of the relationship. Those are all complaints about a book it never set out to be.

Autotheory is an ugly word for a real form — thinking done in public through the material of a life, where the life is the evidence and not the subject. The test isn't whether you feel you know her by the last page. The test is whether the thinking arrives somewhere it could not have arrived without the life attached. Here it does, repeatedly.

Her citation method is what people fight about. Sources go in the margin instead of the sentence, so a borrowed thought sits inside her voice without quotation marks around it and without pretending to be hers. I've seen this called a gimmick. It isn't. It solves a genuine problem, which is that naming a theorist mid-paragraph stops the paragraph dead, while footnoting sends you to the back of the volume at the exact moment you should be reading on. Try those passages with the names spliced back into the prose and watch the temperature drop.

The strongest section, and the one that would survive extraction, is her argument about what she calls the many-gendered mothers of her heart, together with the refusal to make Harry's transition and her pregnancy into a neat rhyme. Her own structure keeps offering that rhyme and she keeps declining it. Two bodies changing at once is a gift to a lesser writer and a trap she notices.

Now my objection. Theory density is uneven in a manner that reads as mood rather than plan. There are stretches where the reader is expected to arrive with Sedgwick and Butler already in hand, and stretches where she explains a term she'd assumed twelve pages earlier. I lost the thread completely in one passage about the ordinary and the anti-normative, and I've been back three times without getting it, which may well be my failing. Someone explain that passage to me. I mean that as an actual request, not a rhetorical shrug.

Deborah's objection is different and better than mine. She says the book is warmer than it permits itself to sound, that the theoretical register is armour, and that this armour costs it readers who would have adored everything about the baby. I think she's right. I think Nelson would probably agree and do it again anyway.

The birth section, cut against the death of Harry's mother, is the section I'd defend to anybody. No commentary on the juxtaposition whatsoever. She sets them side by side and lets you do the work, having spent the entire book training you to be capable of it.

Eight. Read it slowly, keep a browser open, and don't let anyone sell it to you as a love story.