Where I End and We Begin
CONSTRUCTING A NERVOUS SYSTEM: A Memoir
BY MARGO JEFFERSON
Pantheon, 208 pp., $26
IN NEGROLAnD (2015), her National Book Critics Circle Award–winning memoir about her upbringing among the Black upper class in Chicago, Margo Jefferson blends a wry personal narrative with an expansive range of historical, critical, and self-critical perspectives. Now comes Constructing a Nervous System, another kind of memoir, one in which an exploration of the self becomes an act of inhabiting and examining various lives—writers, musicians, athletes, members of her family. If Negroland stretches and challenges the conventions of the genre, Constructing a breaks those conventions apart: figuratively, in the frequent eclipse of the remembering “I” by a roving and interrogating eye, and literally, in the reliance on the fragment as the dominant form.
