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.

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.

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 vintage and revenge of memory, its random lurch and rough stroke: this is her great theme, 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.

Every sentence of Constructing a Nervous System gives the reader a sense of a roving, highly individuated consciousness in conversation with itself.

Jefferson's...negotiation involves her intellectual past and present more than her life experiences.

A thrillingly original personal narrative.

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.

[A] bold and roving work.

An inspired and unstinting examination of American class, culture, and personal memory.