Ethel, Ella and all that jazz: the soundtrack of a Chicago childhood

Margo Jefferson’s 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: ‘Older women’s tales… are hard to pull off,’ she writes: ‘They risk being arch.’ But Jefferson is never arch. Her eye is too keen and her aim too true. She turns her clear gaze and razor-sharp intellect on America past and present, where freedoms are skewed and limited by race and gender.

The book is about the second half of a life, which is where the real action – rather than the reaction of youth – takes place, though it is shaped by the first act: childhood, and the lineage of a family and culture. In the opening chapter, Jefferson sets out the terms of her engagement, writing that she grew ‘dissatisfied’ with ‘the stonemasonry model of the human self… that admires itself for saying go on’.

This rigid, inherited model, one that brought her some distance on her trajectory as a woman writer and critic, required her to ‘chisel away at the unworthy parts – then rebuild’. In order to thrive, she invents a new model of the self that is unfixed, that is alive; one that enables her to live fully and write freely. In doing so, she makes memoir – the genre du jour – tensile, alive and fresh:

I wanted it to become an apparatus of mobile parts, parts that fuse, burst, fracture, cluster, hurtle and drift. I wanted to hear its continuous thrum. THRUM go the materials of my life. Chosen, inherited, made up. I imagined it as a nervous system. But not the standard biological one. It was an assemblage. My nervous system is my structure of recombinant thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations and words.