Constructing a Nervous System

The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and acclaimed author of Negroland boldly and brilliantly fuses cultural analysis and memoir to probe race, class, family and art.

Electric [Jefferson] takes vital risks, tosses away rungs of the ladder as it climbs, and offers an indispensable, rollicking account of the enchantments, pleasures, costs, and complexities of "imagin[ing] and interpret[ing] what had not imagined you

Margo Jefferson has created a startling and digressive form of auto-analysis... an intimate view of the aesthetic and political landscape of American culture and the secrets, longing, withholding and disavowal necessary to imagine oneself inside it and ward off its damage

She knows everything and has felt it all deeply. If you want to know who we are and where we've been, read Margo Jefferson

Margo Jefferson is one of our most nuanced thinkers on the intersections of race, class, and feminism. Her latest Constructing a Nervous System is especially alive is both spiky and supple; jagged

This is one of the most imaginative-and therefore moving-memoirs I have ever read

Jefferson is as precise and sensitive as ever, nonpareil in her scope and ability to synthesize the circus of traditions, arcs, and performances that make up a life

This is a moving portrait of the life of a brilliant African American woman's mind. Margo Jefferson is so real, her sensibility so literary, her learning such a joy. The gifts of reading her are many

A tour-de-force of personal narrative

Margo Jefferson is the rare memoirist who is always daring the reader to keep up... It is impossible not to be stirred by her odes to fellow black American strivers of excellence

Constructing a Nervous System compresses memoir and cultural criticism into one slim, explosive volume, and in doing so the Pulitzer Prize-winning author makes both forms new. Hers is a wry, intimate portrayal of a passionate and intellectual woman coming to maturity... Jefferson has that rare ability to make her reader see things anew.

Part autobiography, part cultural criticism, [Margo Jefferson] reminds us that the rules for how we structure memory, and how we tell our stories, are not immutable.

Lithe and always surprising... [Jefferson] paints a remarkable portrait of herself as a singular kind of performer

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Margo Jefferson was a theatre and book critic for Newsweek and the New York Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, Vogue, New York magazine and New Republic. She is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts. She is the author of Negroland - shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award - and On Michael Jackson.