If Margo Jefferson had gone into another profession — cabinetmaking, let’s say — she’d be the type to draw and redraw plans for a cabinet, build and tinker with the cabinet, stand back to look at the cabinet from every angle, probe the purpose of woodworking...disassemble her own product and start from scratch with alternative tools, creating an object that no longer resembled a cabinet but performed all the functions of one in startling ways ... This is the spirit in which her second memoir, Constructing a Nervous System, proceeds. Her experiment is instantly effective ... Her new book begins by cross-examining what...'me' consists of, posing the question of how to author a memoir when you chafe against the concept of authority. Two solutions come to mind. One, go mad. Two, redraw the boundaries of the genre ... This is a book for deep submergence, not quick flipping. This is appointment reading ... It takes a strong sensibility to make all of this jump-cutting not only coherent but hypnotic. Jefferson’s sensibility is one of exquisitely personal engagement with art ... Jefferson writes about craving 'license' as a young woman, dispensation to play 'with styles and personae deemed beyond my range.' She has...grabbed hold of that permission slip and torn it to shreds.

Rather than using her life’s narrative to structure the book, she organizes her becoming through her models. Who, she asks herself, were those people she secreted away? In whose eyes did she see herself reflected? The collection is unorthodox ... Memoir, the highest form of autofiction, is an unmannerly genre. Its appeal lies in its indecency. Jefferson’s indecency lies in her honesty about the contortions into which black intellectuals have long been forced ... Jefferson doesn’t shy away from her attraction to certain artists who might otherwise have earned her disavowal. She is at her most dexterous when discussing two otherwise unrelated giants: Ike Turner and Willa Cather ... The book is a marvel as a work of criticism and would serve well as a manual for writing, in the sense of teaching the practice as a means of thinking. As in Negroland, Jefferson circles back on herself, questioning, clarifying, and complicating her own intentions. She works through what cannot quite be expressed ... The brilliance of the culture we have shaped is not dimmed by the pressure of Jefferson’s interrogation. What’s left is something awe-inspiring, but more fractious, more prone to false starts and massive leaps. Its power demands such criticism, such insistent questioning.

Margo Jefferson’s new memoir is a pleasing reminder that we have not quite seen it all. And Jefferson delivers her surprises in fewer than 200 potent pages ... The distinguished thinker...shoves aside old ideas about memoir as mere biography. Her approach is an almost poetic presentation of fragments of her experiences as they ricocheted off artists whose work and lives she has found meaningful. It’s an extraordinary reading experience — the first book I recall wanting to reread immediately after reaching the end ... She lures us into a dreamy and peripatetic journey of the mind and heart. She uses her elegant voice and some theater lingo to persuade us to focus on her nuanced ideas about race, class identity and, to some extent, family ... Jefferson exudes charisma on the page with a voice that commands attention almost regardless of content ... Constructing a Nervous System offers the reader an opportunity to become comfortable with the discomfort of life’s contradictions ... Constructing a Nervous System is a diary that often stops to directly address the reader. It’s a stage performance and maybe a therapy session. Above all, it is meaningful cultural criticism. Jefferson invites us to rethink our experiences with art while finding resonance in intimacies that she shares from her own life. I still can’t say I know exactly how she manages to make this all succeed. I only know that she does, and it is splendid.

The vintage and revenge of memory, its random lurch and rough stroke: this is her great theme, Margo Jefferson ... She prizes apart autobiography, splits it totally open; lunges audaciously at the delusions of the American demesne; flails and impales shibboleths; and she records her findings ... The technique is that of estranging exposition followed upon by swift identification ... The arcade of memory is collapsed into one huge heap. Jefferson refuses chronology, neglects to date her reminiscences. The mode is memoir, but equally is it intellectual history ... Experience itself is her métier. Jefferson is all the time affected, always securing impressions ... Jefferson’s policy is one of radical imagination into and out of their predicaments, those beau ideals, their situations of alluring and historical specialty ... Jefferson’s policy is one of radical imagination into and out of their predicaments, those beau ideals, their situations of alluring and historical specialty ... She takes in whatsoever is propitious to subsume, only that, to the omission of all the insalubrious rest; she wants for herself Ideas, collects them, adjoining them to her person with omnivorous concern ... This is Constructing a Nervous System, or what we might finally come to call Margo Jefferson by Margo Jefferson.

Having proven herself an enthralling memoirist and a masterful cultural critic, Jefferson overlaps those skills in her formally improvisational and percolating new book ... Her narration is kaleidoscopic; she forgoes chronology and exposition in favor of tumbling fragments and shifting personae. In the spotlight she poses, gestures, and animates her sensory network development through a series of avatars and 'expedient muses' ... Jefferson has sifted through her journals and her assignment history to resource the material informing her performance on the page. Using the profile, interpretation, close narration, and quotation as critical techniques, Jefferson collaborates with these characters, cutting, scratching, sampling to make herself ... Perhaps Jefferson’s inventive resistance to straight-ahead memoir speaks to her worries about putting her personal business on the page ... we deserve Jefferson’s collected reviews and essays. It would be both a handbook for writing criticism and her truest autobiography ... Forcefully, gracefully, Constructing illustrates that the Black critic always enacts her interiority, self-assembly, and education publicly.

Every sentence of Constructing a Nervous System gives the reader a sense of a roving, highly individuated consciousness in conversation with itself ... The book also serves as an excellent guide for how to write sublime criticism ... Jefferson doesn't live down to this idea of a cartoon critic. She suffers no fools, flatters no one's tastes, and delivers gusts of uncompromising prose. Her remit is extremely broad ... There are also more sobering sections on the long reach of anti-Black racism ... One of the strongest sections (and they are all strong) braids together a story of this 'unsheltered I' with a tour-de-force critique of the expectations heaped on Black female athletes ... Nervous System, at its best, resembles dance: a spine-tingling pas de deux for memory and culture, with not a movement wasted. When we reach the last page, we are ready for an encore.

Jefferson's...negotiation involves her intellectual past and present more than her life experiences ... Jefferson devotes most of her time considering the personal and cultural meaning of Black performers ... Despite all the brilliant cultural criticism, personal anecdotes...are my favorite part of the book and I wish there were more of them. As in Negroland, we get to see the sisters in their girlhood and coming of age, but almost nothing about their adult lives ... There's one amusing and interesting account of an affair with a man described as an 'Afro-Brazilan lover' that only whets the appetite for more stories of this kind. Just a suggestion, Professor Jefferson. From a fan.

A thrillingly original personal narrative ... This slim volume is saturated with brilliance ... A fierce and fresh amalgamation of memoir and cultural criticism by one of the country’s most compelling thinkers. Highly recommended.

Like a skilled embroiderer, [Jefferson] blends the multicolored threads of Black cultural life with memories of her past in a memoir that is impressionistic rather than chronological ... Jefferson is a critic’s critic, turning her keenly honed analysis on herself, her family, and her class, while relentlessly interrogating the broader underlying context of white racism.

[A] bold and roving work ... Most intriguing, though, is Jefferson’s self-aware refusal to write from a critic’s remove: when a discussion of Willa Cather’s writing tempts her to launch into lofty analysis, she interjects 'STOP! Collect yourself, Professor Jefferson.' By inviting readers backstage, she creates a dance of memory and incisive cultural commentary that’s deeply and refreshingly personal. This gorgeous memoir elevates the form to new heights.

An inspired and unstinting examination of American class, culture, and personal memory ... Jefferson...moves beyond autobiography into a deeper excavation of music, literature, and personal memory, examining her role in American culture as both the influenced and the influencer ... Jefferson’s unique perspective and relentless honesty and self-examination ensure that there’s something worthwhile on every page. Devotees of Negroland will want to continue the dialogue with this top-notch writer ... A dynamic, unflinchingly candid examination of the impacts of race and class on culture and the author’s own life.