“It doesn’t take me long to realise that no one wants to read this pathemata,” Maggie Nelson writes in her new book Pathemata, Or The Story of My Mouth. The word ‘pathemata’, which is one half of the Greek phrase ‘pathemata mathemata’ (knowledge gained through adversity), can mean either ‘suffering’ or ‘passion’. When I first read Pathemata, all I could see was suffering. It is a book that explores Nelson’s chronic mouth pain, which doctors are unable to diagnose, as well as the death of her friend and academic Christina Crosby, who she writes about in Bluets. Set against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, it dramatises what Nelson calls being locked into a “pain puzzle”. It is not just, or even really, about mouth pain, but psychic pain, shared pain and the pain of being alive. 

After speaking with Nelson, I became more attuned to the ambiguity of the book’s title. “Things like joy and happiness are palpable because of their shadows,” she tells me. “You wouldn’t feel the excitement of being alive if you weren’t going to die. Joy is an experience because it’s different from sadness, but they both bring their shadows.”  

Below, the LA-based writer and author of 12 books, including The Argonauts, The Art of Cruelty, On Freedom, and more, speaks to us about Pathemata, why we share stories about our pain, and the patriarchy’s fear of the vagina and the mouth. 

Can you speak a bit about the format of Pathemata, Or The Story of My Mouth? It’s fragmented similarly to Bluets, using vignettes of daily life, doctor’s visits, dreams and memories. It really speaks to dealing with pain and grief, where you sometimes can’t decipher what is real and what is fake. Why do you utilise this format to catalogue something as indescribable as pain? 

Maggie Nelson: Because I came up in poetry, the question of form is always open. Sometimes, the book will tell you what form it wants to take. I also read Herve Gubiert’s The Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976–1991, a posthumous collection of his diaries that I love. Sometimes, you find a book that moves how you want your writing to. While reading it, I thought to myself, ‘Oh, how does this move?’ It moves with double white space between paragraphs, which indicates that these are separate entries, and yet, they’re not a journal; they’re not in sequential order. I wanted the things that touched the pandemic or things happening exterior to the kind of deep interiority of the book, like into the mouth and into the dream life, to be very glancing, you know? So, I’d mention seeing the January 6 riots happen on TV. Things are happening, but I intentionally tried to dispense with them in single lines so that they were there, but they weren’t dilated. 

A lot of the dreams in Pathemata were dreamed during the time of writing, but some were older. I’ve been writing down my dreams for a long time. This was a weird book to write for this reason, because sometimes I would feel like I had to wait till I had some more interesting dreams. [Laughs] I would wait around until I had one; if I didn’t, I couldn’t work on it. 

I heard on a podcast that you’ve been recording your dreams for 20 years. Why did you start doing that? My dreams frighten me a lot, and I want to forget them as soon as possible. 

Maggie Nelson: I don’t do anything religiously as a writer. I do everything very sporadically. I don’t write down my dreams every morning. I agree with you; sometimes I have a dream, and it’s so intense that I actively move away from it and don’t write it down. But I think that there’s something about the practice of writing down dreams that is super interesting. For me, it’s related to writing in general, which is that there’s something like a mental shape, narrative or experience here, and you don’t know when you start to write it down if it’s gonna fly away or if you’re gonna capture it. But I think people who write down their dreams notice that they remember more about the dream as they write it, which is also true if you write about a memory. People think writing has to do with ideas, images, or memories, but writing is just about language, so as soon as you go to write the dream down, you’re really just contending with the sentences you’re making that evoke it [the dream]. 

[It’s important] that we keep flowing and putting things out in a world that is increasingly gripped by reactionary, misogynistic phenomena 

What does the mouth, or your mouth, mean to you? I know Pathemata is not just about the mouth, but you stress its importance, for example, in the role of the writer. So I’d love to know more about how you think about mouths.   

Maggie Nelson: Well, there’s a lot to say about mouths. Both Pathemata and a little zine I wrote that comes out in the UK in November, which is about Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift, deal with the mouth. For the essay about Swift and Plath, I make use of Anne Carson’s essay, The Gender of Sound, and it’s about, from the ancient Greeks, ways of regulating female emanation, and that was either from their mouths, like the sound of their mourning. And then, of course, because the mouth and the vagina are the two interfaces, portals, liminal spaces where things come in and out, and things come out of the vagina too that scare the shit out of men and patriarchy, there’s a kind of twin regulation of what comes out of both orifices. But it’s not always about gender. I think a lot of this book [Pathemata] is just about different forms of pleasure and humiliation that happen at the site where we take things in and out, because it’s where we exchange with the world. 

I have thought for a long time about the gendered nature of the mouth, growing up as someone who was very chatty and talked a lot, and the way that, on the one hand, it can be seen as intelligence, but at the same time, very ditzy. I think at a deeper level, the juvenile aspect of the book is about wanting to be heard; that’s why, twinned with this idea of a pain diary that you’re bringing to doctors and no one really cares, is learning to listen and to let other people in. So, I think the book has a lot of silence, too, and a lot of pauses for that reason.  

The Swift and Plath book sounds so interesting. Can you tell us more about it?

Maggie Nelson: Yeah, the first line of it says, ‘Above all things, Sylvia Plath desired fame. Jacqueline Rose tells us, as she says at one point in her journals, ‘It’s sad only to be able to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me.’ So it starts with Plath, and I go through her vast ambitions and other things and go on to Swift, who also started very young, wanting people to mouth her and yet, you know, Plath didn’t survive to see her fame, but Swift is living it. It’s called The Slicks because Sylvia Plath wrote in her journal, ‘I will slave and slave until I break into the slicks.’ The slicks are like glossy magazines. So, I think I was working on this piece, and I had just finished writing Pathemata and was thinking a lot about the relationship between wanting to mouth others, wishing to be mouthed and the mouth. But also with Plath and Swift and many others, that misogynistic dislike of profusion and autobiography and how important it is that we keep flowing and putting things out in a world that is increasingly gripped by reactionary, misogynistic phenomena. 

I think at a deeper level, the juvenile aspect of the book is about wanting to be heard 

Yeah, I felt very seen in the part of the book where you mentioned that an older adult asked if you had an off switch as a child because you were so chatty. Those comments used to hurt me a lot, and honestly, still do. 

Maggie Nelson: Yeah, it’s hard, right? That’s what I mean when I talk about the juvenile aspect of the book, like the child self is very hurt by that, but as a parent now, too, I know kids can be a lot. The parent was probably like, ‘Oh my god, I just took care of this child for a week, and they can’t stop talking, and I am exhausted,’ you know? The same is true when I mention the doctors in this book, too. Many people have read this book and been like, ‘Oh, this is a catalogue of how awful doctors are’, and I actually didn’t quite see it like that. I mean, I have my own rage towards doctors. Still, I was more trying to find the tragic, comic element of when you come into the doctor’s office with a whole lifetime of pain in your, for example, knees or hands, all the way down to your ancestors’ pain, the weight of what it all means, and they’re just trying to grade your arthritis and prescribe you a cream. It’s a total mismatch of what we bring and what they offer, and that’s not really their fault. It would be great if they could hold our histories and psychologies, but they can’t. So, I think that this book is more about the realisation that the doctor’s office wasn’t the right place to take this meditation of my mouth, this book is.

Pain is difficult to describe. Elaine Scarry writes that it is “unsharable”. In Pathemata, you highlight how pain can be easily dismissed, even by those who love you. Even with its unsharability, why do you think we have this compulsion to write about (our) pain? 

Maggie Nelson: I can’t remember who said this, I think it might have been the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, but because we’re not in each other’s bodies when we tell each other that something hurts, weirdly, and this is tragic, but one of the first responses we can have is distrust, we don’t believe them, because it’s just not our body. So if I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, Halima, my pinky is killing me.’ You’re like, ‘Oh, that’s too bad.’ There’s a big chasm, and I think that distrust makes people feel frenetically wanting not to be individuated, privatised or left alone with their pain. So we try to tell each other, and we can’t ever feel each other’s pain, but we can recognise the call that somebody wants to be heard and recognised for being in anguish. 

I’ve written 12 books now, and I’m kind of like, geez, a lot of these are pretty dark. Still, I will say that hearing from so many people, depending on what the book’s content is, people who might have physical pain, people who’d lost a family member to violence, whatever it is, the magic of writing is that social aspect. It doesn’t have to be mouth pain; it doesn’t have to be a sexual murder in your family, but you can just feel less alone in knowing that someone has feelings similar to you. I think that’s why we read too, you know? To feel less alone. We remind ourselves that other people are human beings, too. 

Pathemata, Or The Story of My Mouth, is out now. The Slicks is out in November 2025, published by Fern Press.