Review: Like Love

When Words Are All We Have
Review: Like Love

Kelli Hughes

Maggie Nelson
Collection of Essays and Interviews
Graywolf Press, pp. 352
Cost: $32.00

The word love—and related affixes, including lover and beloved—appears 159 times in Maggie Nelson’s Like Love. That figure shouldn’t come as a surprise given the essay collection’s title. Nelson, a prominent and prolific writer who has previously examined the intangible and ever present idea of love in her autotheoretical book The Argonauts (2015), forms the title from a quote by writer Hilton Alys: “Every mouth needs filling: with something wet or dry, like love, or unfamiliar and savory, like love.” Nelson satiates that need in Like Love, giving her readers chunks of critical theory to chew on and delectable bites of raw honesty and vulnerability to savor. ​

Nelson explores a variety of subjects across thirty-one essays and interviews; her comprehensive knowledge of queer and feminist theory is paired with moving ruminations on death and loss, as well as relatable frustrations with the pervasive struggles of writing. And yet, even with this broad range of topics, Nelson’s writings are united through the play of language. In “The Understory: On Kara Walker’s 'Event Horizon',” Nelson details her encounter with Walker’s mural at New School University. She cites the New School’s official press release for the mural and takes issue with how the release characterizes the scene depicted in Event Horizon: ​

And just like that, the complexity of the piece—all the despair, idleness, free fall, enigma, boredom, sadism, and loss—gets refigured as a ‘struggle for freedom and opportunity’—the default narrative that is so often the only one we are willing to promulgate, see, or make visible. (199)

Nelson’s thoughts are rich with interpretations which are lost when the mural is simplified to one sentence, to one idea. Yet Nelson also speaks to how the limitations of language are ones we place ourselves: unearthing and discussing the complexities of American chattel slavery and its impact cannot happen if (white) audiences are not willing to see beyond the default narrative. 

While we may chafe against self-imposed restrictions, language is not predetermined to fail us. In fact, language is the means by which we enter into the world, capture it, and create it. Nelson’s issues with the description of "Event Horizon," after all, were with how the complexity and multiplicity of meaning were watered down; language equally offers the opportunity for expansion. In her preface to Like Love, Nelson writes, “Words aren’t just what’s left; they’re what we have to offer” (xiii). Throughout her many essays and interviews, Nelson reiterates the want and the need which motivates writing. What writers put on the page isn’t the table scraps left from something greater, but the whole meal and the blood, sweat, and tears that came with it. Writing offers the opportunity of understanding, of shared experiences.

No one will know what it’s like if we don’t tell it, even, or especially, when we ourselves don’t know exactly what it is we’re telling, only what we’re seeing, feeling, wanting, loving. (97)

There is an urgency behind putting one’s experience into writing, not only for our audience’s sake, but for writers. For ourselves. We can only account for what we see, feel, want, love; our meaning—what we tell—is something we create through our words.   

And what of this creation that is “like love”? How can something be like love, but not love? Is such a thing—this “like love”—a weak substitute or does it possess its own value? Nelson provides her own answer, deciding that attempting to isolate and differentiate “love” from something “like love” is a fruitless endeavor. What matters is our devotion to ourselves, our communities, our worlds, and our words; and what are words if not a creation of love?