Melissa Febos - Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

Selected Praise for Melissa Febos

Body Work

Melissa Febos has written one of the most liberating books on the subject of writing that I can think of. A tender, urgent intelligence, a wisdom that is hard-won, and a rigor born from a love for the craft preside I learned so much reading Body Work that I cant wait to teach and use on the page.

A LEXANDER C HEE , author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

Ferociously smart and piercingly insightful, Body Work is an instant classic of the how-and-why-do-we-write form. With candor and clarity, Melissa Febos explores the complexities of writing courageously and honestly about our lives. Its a book Ill return to again and again.

C HERYL S TRAYED , author of Wild

Melissa Feboss Body Work is the most necessary book about memoir Ive read. Daring, honest, psychologically insightful, and absolutely whip smart. A must-read for anybody shoving a pen across paper or staring into a screen or a past.

M ARY K ARR , author of The Art of Memoir

Girlhood

Febos proves herself to be one of the great documenters of the terrible and exquisite depths of girlhood. These essays are moss and ironhard and beautifuland struck through with Feboss signature brilliance and power and grace. An essential, heartbreaking project.

C ARMEN M ARIA M ACHADO , author of In the Dream House

Between the intellect and the body a third term emerges, dissolving binaries and reinventing the space of erotic power and creativity. A fuck-all guide to resilience and reclamation, a breathtaking reimagination of who we might be in spite of what weve been told. Girlhood will bring you back to life.

L IDIA Y UKNAVITCH , author of The Chronology of Water

An exquisite collection. Feboss insight is devastating, the examinations of her worldfrom the female body, queerness, consent, slut-shaming, and intimacyare rigorous and compassionate.

S TEPHANIE D ANLER , author of Sweetbitter

Febos is an intoxicating writer, but I found myself most grateful for the vivid clarity of her thinking disquisitive and catalyticit doesnt demand change so much as expose certain injustices so starkly that you might feel you cannot abide them another minute.

The Atlantic

Feboss own voice is so irreverent and original in a feminist canon that includes Adrienne Rich, and Maggie Nelsons theory-minded masterpieces: smart, radical company.

The New York Times Book Review

Febos illuminates how women are conditioned to be complicit in our own exploitation. Like much of her scholarship, it begins with somatic knowledge of the self.

The Washington Post

Abandon Me

Febos is a strikingly talented writer who pushes at the boundaries of her form and shows us just how amazing and expansive it can be.

J ENNY O FFILL , author of Dept. of Speculation

Its rare to read a book as generous as it is genius I dont know that Ive ever felt more thankful to read a book.

K IESE L AYMON , author of Heavy

Bold Mesmerizing The sheer fearlessness of the narrative is captivating.

The New Yorker

Anyone whos read Febos knows that her work explores boundaries as deftly as it defies categorization.

Esquire

ALSO BY MELISSA FEBOS

Girlhood

Abandon Me

Whip Smart

For my students

Contents

T his is not a craft book in the traditional sense. That is, this book is not a manifesto or a manual. There are many great volumes of such books and Ive listed some of them in my bibliography. While there is some practical advice herein, that is not the aim of this book. These essays are attempts to describe the ways that writing is integrated into the fundamental movements of my life: political, corporeal, spiritual, psychological, and social. They are by no means comprehensive even in this task.

I have found that a fulfilling writing life is one in which the creative process merges with the other necessary processes of good living, which only the individual can define. This holistic approach is pragmatic in the sense that it ensures the discipline, because while I sometimes resist the work of writing, I resist my own psychic suffering more, and writing has become for me a primary means of digesting and integrating my experiences and thereby reducing the pains of living, or if not, at least making them useful to myself and to others. There is no pain in my life that has not been given value by the alchemy of creative attention.

Cultivating this kind of relationship to writing has also, to a great extent, relieved me from the bondage of my own vanities, which pose a greater threat to my creative practice than any other constraint, including that of time. I have observed that we bring the best of ourselves to writing and that publishing brings out our worst. I like to think that my relationship to making art is utterly discrete from my relationship to reception, the latter being ambivalent at best. I am immeasurably grateful for the privilege of publication and I also know that seeking self-esteem in its rewards is a dicey enterprise, at least for those of us who cherish our mental serenity and want to preserve the pleasurable aspects of creation.

I became a writer because I loved writing and I still do. I became a writer because the process helped me survive and it still does. I do not think that the vocation of writer is superior to any other, but I do believe it is the most useful life for me, the one in which I can most be of service to this questionable project of human civilizationpartly because it is where my strengths lie, and partly because it keeps me stable enough to be available in other respects.

I did not interview other writers for the purposes of this book, though the idea tempted me. There are an infinite number of people whose experiences would differently illustrate the principles Ive set down, but here I have focused on articulating my own thoughts. This is appropriate, I suppose, for a book about devotion to the practice of personal writing.

For reasons that I delineate in the following pages, many writers and potential writers have been discouraged from this practice. I hope that this book also provides a counterpoint to some of the arguments that lurk behind such discouragement, and to make transparent their fundamental superficiality and some of their many implicit biases. Writing is a form of freedom more accessible than many and there are forces at work that would like to withhold it from those whose stories most threaten the regimes that govern this society. Fuck them. Write your life. Let this book be a totem of permission, encouragement, proof, whatever you need it to be.

Melissa Febos

April 2021

Iowa City, IA

I n a recent nonfiction workshop I taught, a female student cringed when I suggested she include more of her own story in an essay. The narrative experimented with form, and suggested a history of sexual trauma, but quickly shifted into more lyrical and analytical musing on the general subject. She frowned. But I dont want to seem self-absorbed. You know, navel-gazing. The rest of the roomnearly all womennodded. This is a scene that has played out everywhere I have taught writing: at colleges of all sizes, conferences, and private salons. It is a concern I have heard from countless students and peers, and which I have often greeted with a combination of bafflement and frustration. Since when did telling our own stories and deriving their insights become so reviled? It doesnt matter if the story is your own, I tell them over and over, only that you tell it well. Should we not always tell stories so that their specificity reveals some larger truth?