"It’s overly glib to call a book a page-turner. But the fact is, I entered this one somewhat casually, with few expectations: widowed mother and spinster daughter fall on hard times and turn their house into a bed-sit? What else is new? What was new were the tenants who turned life upside down in startlingly erotic and terrifying ways. I could not put this one down. And in fact I would pick it up again in a heartbeat—even knowing what happens. It’s how it happens that grabs you and won’t let go."

"The story is about the author’s relationship with artist Harry Dodge, who is fluidly gendered. It’s about their romance, the birth of their son, the death of Harry’s mother and their changing bodies, as Maggie becomes pregnant and Harry undergoes surgery, but it’s also about inclusion and the powers and shortfalls of language. It might require a bit of work but The Argonauts rewards us with an expansive way of considering identity, caretaking, and freedom—along with a liberation from, what Maggie calls, ‘the demand that anyone live a life that’s all one thing.'"

"In Argentina’s ‘dirty war’ in the ’70s, the military government had thousands of activists and political opponents ‘disappeared.’ This novel is about a mother and father dealing with the disappearance of their son. It’s a moving book that also has a lot of dark comedy in it. For instance, the parents accept free nose jobs in exchange for a debt. It also captures the comic absurdity of the bureaucracy of a dictatorship. What’s most interesting to me is, as one character makes clear, the truth tellers in life are so often written off as crazy."

"My parents got divorced when I was about eight, and after that I moved with my mother from St. Louis to Boston. I became her movie pal, and she would take me to some very inappropriate movies! This was one of them. The Graduate has one of my favorite montages ever—that one where Dustin Hoffman jumps off a diving board and lands on Anne Bancroft’s chest! It’s sexy and beautiful, but it also captures how this young man spirals into a state of jadedness over the course of a summer."

"I kind of felt like it was just so complicated, finding yourself torn between a girlfriend and the mother was just so shocking to me, and so complex. I remember watching it, just being jealous I wasn’t involved in something so complicated and real — things that were never talked about. It felt so taboo at the time. It felt so brave. And I wanted to be in movies like that. That was a long time ago. I need to re-see that. Talking to you is making me want to revisit these movies."