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I characterize Maggie Nelson as “The Conversationalist” and it is to The Argonauts (2015) that I turn in this final chapter. The Argonauts, I argue, is ultimately about beginnings: the beginning of love, step-parenthood, pregnancy, and parenthood (although step-parenthood and parenthood often resemble each other and step-parenthood often becomes parenthood as well). It is the paragon of the new midlife self-writing; it is what has been in the service of what will be. Nelson is ultimately buoyed by the midlife rush of being that I identified in earlier chapters—the rush that suggests confidence in the future and an expansion of self. As with Manguso, motherhood transforms Nelson’s rapturous moments into rapturous chronos. At the end of the The Argonauts, Nelson returns to the theory of moments and finds something new. Of her time with her son thus far, she writes: “[M]y time with him has been the happiest of my life. Its happiness has been of a more palpable and undeniable and unmitigated quality than any I’ve ever known. For it isn’t just moments of happiness, which is all I thought we got. It’s a happiness that spreads.” 1 This is only compounded by her relationship with, and eventual marriage to, Harry Dodge, an American artist whose beloved presence must be protected from the evil eye: “I’ve so obviously gotten everything I’d ever wanted, everything there was to get. The happiness police are going to come and arrest us if we go on this way. Arrest us for our luck