Overview

***Longlisted for the 2025 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay*** Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth is an experiment in interiority written in the pandemic studio. Something of a companion piece to 2009's Bluets, Pathemata merges a pain diary chronicling a decade of jaw pain with dreams and dailies, eventually blurring the lines between embodied, unconscious, and everyday life. In scrupulously distilled prose, Pathemata offers a tragicomic portrait of a particularly unnerving and isolating moment in recent history, as well as an abiding account of how it feels to inhabit a mortal body in struggle to connect with others. Formally inspired by Hervé Guibert'sThe Mausoleum of Lovers, and conceptually guided by Gilles Deleuze's notion of artist as symptomologist, Pathematais yet another urgent innovation from Maggie Nelson in the art of life-writing.

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Reviews

In this thoughtful work, she excavates the duties of parenthood and care, bodies and ageing, loneliness and mortality. The narrative jumps in time, and the lines between reality, dreams and fiction blur. Sinéad Gleeson, The Guardian Returning to the mind, Nelson puts the gnosis back in diagnosis--the mystery and confusion, the reverberations that pain sends through human relationships and through perception itself. The second half of the book's title, ""The Story of My Mouth,"" invokes her vocation as a writer and the condition of being a woman with a lot to say.... Pathemata conveys the reader from plague to palate to parenting with searing images of lived details--no one else does it like Nelson. B. K. Fischer, LARB This unique work embodies its own definitions of hybridity responding to the conditions of its making--a pandemic, a history of mouth issues, a series of dentists, parenthood--as well as to Hervé Guibert's The Mausoleum of Lovers. This is ""an experiment in interiority written in the pandemic studio"" book. This is a Wave book. Fans of Nelson will want Pathemata on their shelves. RMF, Lit Hub

""In this thoughtful work, she excavates the duties of parenthood and care, bodies and ageing, loneliness and mortality. The narrative jumps in time, and the lines between reality, dreams and fiction blur."" --Sinéad Gleeson, The Guardian ""Returning to the mind, Nelson puts the gnosis back in diagnosis--the mystery and confusion, the reverberations that pain sends through human relationships and through perception itself. The second half of the book's title, ""The Story of My Mouth,"" invokes her vocation as a writer and the condition of being a woman with a lot to say.... Pathemata conveys the reader from plague to palate to parenting with searing images of lived details--no one else does it like Nelson."" --B. K. Fischer, LARB ""This unique work embodies its own definitions of hybridity responding to the conditions of its making--a pandemic, a history of mouth issues, a series of dentists, parenthood--as well as to Hervé Guibert's The Mausoleum of Lovers. This is 'an experiment in interiority written in the pandemic studio' book. This is a Wave book. Fans of Nelson will want Pathemata on their shelves."" --RMF, Lit Hub

Author Information

Maggie Nelson is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. She first published Bluets with Wave Books in 2009 - in 2015, the book was named by Bookforum one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years; in 2024, it was adapted into an acclaimed play staged at the Royal Court Theater of London. Her other nonfiction titles include Like Love: Essays and Conversations (2024), On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (2021; named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), the National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts (2015; named by the New York Times one of the top 100 books of the 21st Century), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011; named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial (2007), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007). Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes (2007), and Jane: A Murder (2005). A 2016 MacArthur ""genius"" fellow, she currently teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles. Her newest, Pathemata, or The Story of My Mouth, was published in April 2025.

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