Nelson is a writer and professor married to the artist Harry Dodge, with whom she has two children: her son Iggy, and her stepson Lenny. Among other things, The Argonauts is a memoir spanning the first few years of Nelson and Dodge’s relationship and marriage. This makes Nelson herself both the work’s author and protagonist.

As a narrator, Nelson is extremely candid about both her inner world and the details of her personal life. The book opens with Nelson recounting how she first told Dodge she loved him while they were having anal sex on the floor of his apartment. Nelson is even open about the strain that her candor places on her relationship with Dodge and her worries that in sharing such personal details, she is infringing on her husband and child’s freedom: “I’ve heard many people speak with pity about children whose parents wrote about them when they were young. Perhaps the stories of Iggy’s origins are not mine alone, and thus not mine alone to tell” (140). As this passage demonstrates, however, Nelson’s openness as a narrator is a measured and self-reflective choice; by letting her insecurities, mistakes, and intimate relationships “hang out” (90) in her writing, she works to capture the ambiguity and contradictions of personal identity rather than to resolve them (which, she implies, would be impossible to do anyway).