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’.