I just couldn't get into this book, unfortunately. I wasn't a fan of the writing style so maybe that's what kept me from being able to finish it. Ultimately I didn't get very far so it gets a three from me.

I recommended this for NPR Books We Love, Summer 2022 Edition. My writeup:
Memoir meets criticism in this singular work. Author Margo Jefferson is an acclaimed cultural critic and memoirist, and those paths merge in this sprawling yet cohesive work. At the top of her game in both literary traditions, Jefferson turns her critical eye on herself, charting a life through reflection on pivotal moments in her past and reflections on the artists who shaped her. The result is this stylish and innovative book that defies easy categorization.

I might need to read this book some other time again. As much as I learnt a lot about history through this memoir, I had hard time staying in it. I know this was a ARC and things might be edited but there were few sections that I liked:

“In that 1975 (or 6) journal, I ended my silent rant about the proper way to honor and eulogize black grandmothers with these words: You say you're tired for what your grandmother did? You should be tired because, after all her hard work, if your grandmother were alive she'd probably ask if you'd earned your right to be tired yet. In the privacy of my own psyche, I was not willing to give space to the figure of the generically tired Black Grandmother. Mine had worked unceasingly to will herself out of that role. And she had an early death to show for it. If she were alive, here now with me, what would she say? I think she'd say, quietly and not without tenderness: You haven't earned your right to be tired yet, have you, Donkey?”

“Remember: Memoir is your present negotiating with versions of your past for a future you're
willing to show up in”

I couldnt get into this book, but I am sure it will find its audience. I didnt care for the writing style or organization but did like the nuance of this memoir.

My only complaint about this book - it ended too soon.
My thanks to NetGalley and Pantheon for an ebook ARC of this title. I put her earlier "Negroland" to the side, and started reading this instead the evening I received access to it. Half way through, I ordered a copy of "Michael Jackson" as well.
A creative highbred between memoir and cultural criticism. It begins with a prologue that reminded me of the start of a Greek tragedy, a discussion of what is to come and why. Not surprising, given that Jefferson was a NYT's drama critic for years (what is surprising is that no dramas are dealt with here).
A bit of stream of consciousness going on here (or branching out every which way, like the nervous system of the title), but it is also obvious that it has been thought about, and considered, and rewritten, over time. A variety of fonts and highlights are used. Unattributed quotations are often included within the text, with the source provided in the Notes at the back of the book. She often reworks quotations (she makes the changes obvious, no subterfuge here), and her representation of Janet Malcolm's quotation on journalists (now repurposed for critics here) is a whopper!
She often writes about music, and the part on Ella Fitzgerald and sweat is well worth the price of admission! Willa Cather (a wonderful example of the consideration academic instructors can go through when deciding how to present a text to their class) and "Gone With the Wind" get some time too. I wish she had spent more than a of couple pages on a comparison between James Baldwin and Sammy Davis, Jr. Outspoken, who else would get so quickly to the point that while Bing Cosby (one of her childhood favorites!) was slying smiling and crooning and playing priests on the Big Screen, he essentially had abandoned his wife to the alcoholism that killed her, and from which she had saved him just a few years earlier. Or that 2 of his 4 children committed suicide.
It is exciting to watch her brilliance at work, and I pretty much burned through this short work (I think it is a little over 200 pp of text). Even though it was late at night, I wanted to go on to the next chapter. I'm looking forward to reading her other books in the next couple of weeks.
Outstanding.

Construction a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson is her cerebral foray into the medium of memoir. Jefferson is clearly incredibly intelligent and articulate. The writing is beautifully poetic and the overall format is a bit fragmented and experimental. I was glad to be reading this on my Kindle as I had to look up so many words. This being such an intellectual and experimental text, i had a hard time connecting to the narrator. I would recommend this for those who are looking for a more poetic and academic text.

Thank you Knopf Doubleday and NetGalley for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I DNF’d this one at 25%.

I normally give memoirs more wiggle room, but I found this a cloying attempt at broadcasting self-awareness (note: broadcasting v. actual self-awareness or introspection) while breaking the fourth wall with a weird wink toward being meta, without actually accomplishing anything with those tools.

It’s as if she took a drawer full of random post-its and torn slips of paper and vaguely organized the fragments without creating a narrative or examining ideas— just literally transcribing notes into a document. If you’ve read around in postmodern literature, none of this style is anywhere near new and this book is a particularly derivative and weak retread.

"Go on."

I've long been anticipating Margo Jefferson's follow-up to the sublime "Negroland," which, next to Anne Boyer's "The Undying," is, I think, one of the finest, ground-breaking memoirs of the twenty-first century.

"Constructing a Nervous System" is performed in a different register that acknowledges then resists and refuses to be constricted and confined by the conventions of the genre that powered the former: it is looser, freer, alive, more associative, less baggy, sharper, so so funny ("You still speak Ebonics"), acerbic and astute, and even more erudite, though that should come to no surprise for readers of this stylish literary diva. Iconoclast? She, without a doubt, has the range.

She made me widen my eyes, opened doors in my critical mind, was able to surface memories in my life I'd repressed (and also childhood attachments to her attachments: Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Etta James, Marianne Moore). I, too, refuse to get married, suffer through my painful solitude, the solace of my chastity, internalize the lives of my beloveds, observe and note, criticize, try to find the right outlet for all this energy: Jefferson offers a way out of a preternatural sensitivity to the world, of being an attentive reader who wants to write.

Additionally there is a series of hard-won advice for would-be writers peppered throughout. This book, a dream, begins with a dream, and ends with an imagined question by her grandmother. Though I did not always know who it was she was writing about (Bud Powell and Ike Turner, for instance), immediately after finishing a chapter I went onto YouTube and acquainted myself with her references, made them my own (my favourite encounter was being attuned to the bead of sweat (Or should we say diaphoresis?) falling down Ms. Fitzgerald's cheek during a performance of "Summertime," the way that I was suddenly able to understand the politics of her daintily dabbing her brow was so thrilling).

There is enough personal testimony and critical analysis to make even what is not familiar to you feel so, which makes this an inviting book, one that is always in conversation with the reader, never speaking down or excluding us. After all these years of writing and thinking critically, Ms. Jefferson has nailed the fine balance between being exhaustive without ever being exhausting. And how tender our reliable narrator is.

She is not afraid of checking herself every now and then, disclosing unbecoming truths and owning up to them. I, too, was a moody but precocious child who looked for "avatars" to form the "self," but for me it was white actresses. Until now I did not have the language for what I've been doing, to have such an understanding of my artistic temperament. I have the desire; but do I have the will? I was deeply, deeply moved.

I read this in two sittings, one day apart (there is only so much I can stay at the elevated plane of her thought; like a sprinter keeping up with a marathon runner), but I breezed through these pages with such pleasure, such relish, such bliss. If you liked Vivian Gornick's "The Odd Woman And the City," or Saidiya Hartman's "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments," there are plenty opportunities to have images from those book to be refreshed in memory, but the book, formally at least, stands alone: I can't think of anything like it: it is a model of how a cultural, temperamental autobiography can be pulled off.

Jefferson somehow seemingly effortlessly fuses the words of George Eliot and W.E.B. Dubois, does a close reading of the work of Willa Cather I've never seen the likes of before, and we fortunately get to read about her late sister, Denise Jefferson, and her love life (this section reminded me of Annie Ernaux's "Simple Passion").

And the syntax? The rhythms? Those fragmented sentences? The theatrical imaginations and meta scenes? Lo!

When Margo Jefferson uses a semi-colon you straighten your back: I always learn a thing or two about what is possible from her writing. This was the best book I've read in a long time.

"Read on."

(Thank you to NetGalley and Pantheon for making this ARC available to me!)