Maggie Nelson presents Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth
in conversation with Orna Guralnik
RSVP required:
Book + Event Bundle - $35
Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth, is an experiment in interiority written in the pandemic studio.
Something of a companion piece to 2009’s Bluets, Pathemata merges a pain diary chronicling a decade of jaw pain with dreams and dailies, eventually blurring the lines between embodied, unconscious, and everyday life. In scrupulously distilled prose, Pathemata offers a tragicomic portrait of a particularly unnerving and isolating moment in recent history, as well as an abiding account of how it feels to inhabit a mortal body in struggle to connect with others.
Formally inspired by Hervé Guibert’s The Mausoleum of Lovers, and conceptually guided by Gilles Deleuze’s notion of artist as symptomologist, Pathemata is yet another urgent innovation from Maggie Nelson in the art of life-writing.
Maggie Nelson is the author of several acclaimed books of poetry and prose, including most recently, Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth (Wave Books, 2025); Like Love: Essays and Conversations (Graywolf, 2024), the national bestseller On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (2021), the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and international bestseller The Argonauts (2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011), Bluets (2009), The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial (2007), Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007), Something Bright, Then Holes (2007), and Jane: A Murder (2005). A recipient of a 2016 MacArthur “genius” Fellowship, she currently teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Dr. Orna Guralnik is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst and writer. She is faculty of NYU PostDoc and on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Her writing centers on the intersection of psychoanalysis, dissociation, and cultural studies. She is the therapist/psychoanalyst and consulting producer of the Docu-series Couples Therapy, airing on Showtime/Paramount+.
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