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• Melissa Febos Home Page - http://melissafebos.com/about/

  About

  Melissa Febos is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press 2010) and the forthcoming essay collection, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury 2017). Her work has been widely anthologized and appears in publications including Tin House, Granta, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Glamour, Guernica, Post Road, Salon, The New York Times, Hunger Mountain, Portland Review, Dissent, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, Bitch Magazine, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Drunken Boat, and Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York.

  She has been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air, CNN, Anderson Cooper Live, and elsewhere. Her essays have twice received special mention from the Best American Essays anthology and have won prizes from Prairie Schooner, Story Quarterly, and The Center for Women Writers. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and The MacDowell Colony.

  The recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Monmouth University and MFA faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). She serves on the Board of Directors of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, the PEN America Membership Committee, and co-curated the Manhattan reading and music series, Mixer, for nine years. She curates literary events, teaches workshops, and speaks widely. The daughter of a sea captain and a psychotherapist, she was raised on Cape Cod and lives in Brooklyn.

• Rumpus - http://therumpus.net/2017/02/the-rumpus-interview-with-melissa-febos-2/

  THE RUMPUS INTERVIEW WITH MELISSA FEBOS
  BY LEIGH STEIN
  February 27th, 2017

  In her essay on Georgia O’Keeffe, Joan Didion tells an anecdote about taking her seven-year-old daughter to the Art Institute of Chicago. After staring a while at O’Keeffe’s huge cloud canvas, the girl asks “who drew it.” Then she says, “I need to talk to her.” I need to talk to her. That’s the same feeling I got reading Melissa Febos’s new book, Abandon Me, a fiercely intelligent and remarkably intimate essay collection about the border between love and obsession.

  I needed to talk to Melissa about confessional writing, Billie Holiday, reenacting trauma, cataloguing narratives, and the search for identity, even after an agent tells you to write something else.

  ***

  The Rumpus: You and I have a few things in common: we’re both the daughters of therapists, we sang torch songs as teens and dropped out of high school, and we spent our early twenties in the grips of addiction—you with heroin, me with a troubled man. We both kept our addictions secret for as long as we could, fearing an intervention (fearing being seen) more than we feared self-destruction. You write that, over a decade of sobriety, “I have replaced my instinct for secrecy with an instinct for confession.” Could you talk a little bit about how you see personal narrative writing as confessional (or not)? Are you revealing yourself in order to illuminate something in your reader? Can writing ever be too confessional?

  Melissa Febos: “A few things” is kind of an understatement, don’t you think? I’ve never met anyone who shares all those things with me. Or even more than one of those things! I think they likely all spring from the same neighborhood in our personalities, or at least, have a causal relationship. That is, I am secretive. Always have been. And one way that secrecy manifested in my early life was that I was adept at juggling multiple social realities: I could get by no problem in many social arenas (including that of high school), but also felt alienated and totally uninspired by everything that happened there. When you conceal inner reality, this pressure builds. You often don’t expose yourself until it reaches extremity, a breaking point, and what emerges is a dramatic shift—at least in the eyes of others, from whom you’ve hidden the truth. So, dropping out of high school was like that for me. I was fine, I got straight As, I had friends, and then boom, I was like, I’m done. Similarly, I hid my addiction until I finally got sober. I hid my job as a dominatrix for years, and then published a book about it. Big moves that were a long time coming, though few knew that besides me. Maybe you relate?

  It makes sense to me that while living inside of this pattern, I loved torch songs. Torch songs are confessions. They are an expression of feeling that cannot be concealed or contained or minimized. They are marked by anguish, yes, but also by yielding. Listening to, and then mimicking, Billie Holiday allowed me to express what I could not directly. Similarly, I used to go to Catholic church sometimes with my abuela, who was this tiny, fierce, very religious woman. I always wished I could go to confession. I was so full of things I couldn’t name and had an instinct to hide. I felt burdened by the loneliness of my interior life. I wanted some container that I could empty myself into, some ear that would never be shocked, even if it offered me some kind of penance.

  The turning point came when I discovered the necessity of telling my secrets to getting clean. I could not kick heroin to save my life, literally, until I started telling my secrets. It was some of the clearest evidence I’ve ever found of anything. It was the only immediate change in behavior I’ve ever undergone. I told the most frightening truths, and I was free.

  I suppose writing provides that for me now, and that I perform a similar alchemy, or sublimation, with it. It is the torch song, the confessional, the unshockable ear, the room where I say everything for the first time. And it’s a kind of loophole, because no one else enters the room until I let them in. The craft work, too, becomes a mediator between me and my secrets, between me and the listener. It’s as close as I can get, and maybe that’s close enough.

  Rumpus: The torch song as confessional! I never thought of it that way, but that’s brilliant. I always felt when I sang that there was a freedom in the mask of the performance… I could sing such sad, moody songs and pretend that I was voicing a “character,” but secretly I wanted everyone to intuit that I, the singer, was just as sad.

  You write about music again in the final essay, when talking about the Imago theory of relationships, which says we are wounded early on by our primary caretakers, and we spend our lives seeking out lovers that replicate the very best and very worst of those first caretakers. “Every pop song on the radio is an anthem to an Imago,” you write, “the compulsive, consuming, devastating, regressive, mad attachment that goes all the way back to the beginning of us, to our oldest need, when love really was the thing that kept us alive… Abandonment by a lover won’t kill us. But it awakens the parts of us that remember when it could.” I notice this all the time with pop songs (“Now that I’m without your kisses / I’ll be needing stitches”). Do you have any thoughts about what is it about music that connects so viscerally to what we desire and fear? Are there written texts that make you feel that same jolt of recognition? As writers, are we limited but what we can do on the page without the musical accompaniment?

  Febos: I think writing is inherently set up to fail at representing these feelings, because the place to which those feelings are tethered is often a time before we could name them. The absence of objectivity is intrinsic to them. The screaming baby isn’t reflecting on why she is screaming while she is screaming; she’s whirling in the maelstrom of her own need. Desperation precludes reflection. That is one of the reasons why smart people can get involved in very obviously unworkable relationships. Like addiction, that deep, Imago attachment is more powerful than logic, and in fact disables logic. So, any explanation or analysis or reflection on such a feeling is already many steps removed from the experience. Music, on the other hand, isn’t seeking to comment on the experience or transmit some finding about it—it is only seeking to express it. The vicarious experience is much more accessible. We all recognize the sound of that howling, because we all have a similar howling inside of us, however we heed it or hold it or muzzle it or repress it or live in bondage to it.

  I think trauma gets a reductive treatment. We tend to think only violence or molestation or total abandonment qualify as “childhood trauma,” but there are so many ruptures and disturbances in childhood that imprint themselves on us. Attachment begets trauma, in that broader sense, and so if we’ve ever been dependent on anyone, I think there is an Imago blueprint in us somewhere. Winnicott writes about this, how the pain of detachment and differentiation includes some mandatory trauma. It’s not “bad”; it just is.

  I do believe that we all have these stories inside of us, these scars that we compulsive worry as we do wounds, and that drive for redemption, to change the story or resolve it, governs a lot of what we do in love. We are irresistibly drawn to opportunities to reenact those traumas out of a desire to heal, not to punish ourselves. We often think that “bad” relationships are motivating by self-loathing or a wish for self-destruction, but I think that loving people who hurt us is more tied to a profound and earnest wish to soothe ourselves and recover from older hurts. And I’ve also found that having empathy for that urge is the best way to move through it, and beyond it.

  Because of the irresistible nature of our own Imagos, I think the replication of it in music is a siren song—we love those tormented songs, and we listen to them over and over and over the way that we smash ourselves into our lovers, or the same kind of lover, over and over. That drive is tireless, until it is resolved. And we can “enjoy” it safely through music, which is a simulacrum we have power over. You can turn off the song the way you cannot the actual experience. I do hope that people can do the same with my book, in some way.

  Rumpus: There’s so much desire in this collection, but there’s also an obsession with edges and boundaries to contain, or limit, the yearning. You tell an anecdote about swimming in a pool in Florida as a child, and your mother asks you why not swim in the ocean. “Because the pool has sides,” you tell her. It seems to me that a book is kind of like a pool, with a specific depth and sides (and a ladder). It isn’t bottomless or vast as an ocean. How do you create boundaries and limits for yourself in terms of work, to contain the personal material?

  Febos: That is a perfect analogy, and I guess it’s mine. The book is a pool, but even more so the essay. Fiction stymies me with its possibility. I can’t see the bottom and I freeze, cling to the side, or just choke. In nonfiction, particularly that which takes personal narrative for its primary topic, I have a finite space and a finite amount of material. I can’t fabricate material, I can only shape and burrow into it. The constriction turns it into a puzzle, and I love puzzles. I would rather transform or solve something than invent it, I guess. I think I’ve been doing this my whole life. The infinity of my own interior, those of other people, the world, always felt like too much. I think I scare myself with too much possibilities—things that could happen, things I might be capable of. A lot of the experiences I write about could be described as grasping for boundaries, trying to find the limits of things. At a glance, addiction, sex work, mad passion, and all forms of extreme behavior might look like pushing or trying to obliterate boundaries when, more honestly, they are a search for them. I want to find the endpoint, the place where my own powers end, so I can yield to something that I’m certain is bigger than me.

  This collection terrified me. I had no idea where each essay was going when I started it, and before that I’d been a very pragmatic writer—an outliner. Having clear limits—my name, for instance; the pleasure of hickeys; the act and experience of being read to—helped me move into and through this material, which was like groping through a dark room, but a room whose dimensions I could choose.

  Rumpus: You know, I got asked a lot when I was promoting my own memoir about why I didn’t write it as a novel. I didn’t have a good answer for that, but what you say about the daunting possibilities of fiction makes total sense… I didn’t want to imagine all the possible outcomes or motivations. I just wanted to put down what actually happened, and grapple with what it actually meant.

  Throughout this book, I see you constantly searching for the stories that will “transform” or “solve” the material of your own life. Children’s stories, for example, “force logic upon the gruesome facts of our lives. They mirror our troubles and submit them to a chain of causality.” Then you write that as you exchanged long emails with a new lover, you noticed her words were “weighted, as if she were already imagining our correspondence in retrospect. As if she were building the myth of us.”

  I’m curious if there were ever moments where you had to step back and realize you’d absorbed someone else’s frame, or version, of something that had happened in your life. If you ever had to revise a version of a story you’d always taken for granted as true.

  Febos: I actually see this book as a kind of inventory of such narratives. I think our lives are a long series of acquiring and then sloughing narratives. For instance, I think we all are born inside of our parents’ narratives. We stay there for a good while. We are taught their narratives about everything: their marriage, the world, God, gender, identity, etcetera. Then, at some point, our own narrative develops too much integrity to live inside that story. We don’t ever fully escape it, but we move into our own stories. And I do think we can let go of those original ones more fully with concentration and with help.

  For instance, when I was a kid, I was told that I had a biological father, but that he didn’t have much importance. I had an adoptive father who was present, who loved me, who was up to the task. And he was. So, I didn’t question that story, until I was thirty-two, and suddenly realized that I was curious, that he did have something to do with me. Meeting him and figuring out exactly what that meant is a big part of this book.

  The same thing happens in love. The lovers enter into a story together—“this how we met, this is how we were meant for each other”—and then at some point (in my experience, at least), the story splits, and they no longer share it. Then, you either change the story, or you break up. I’ve always broken up.

  I didn’t realize it until I finished the book, but it’s a long investigation of recognizing those stories, and letting them go. Or at least acknowledging that all our stories are part invention— the way we’ve decided to make sense of what has happened.

  It’s very meta, too, to write a book about this dynamic, because the book itself is an enactment of it. I am simultaneously creating a narrative to make sense of my own experiences, and the subject of that book is how we must recognize and destroy narratives to get at a great truth. In a few years maybe I’ll want to destroy the story I’ve written here, who knows.

  Rumpus: I couldn’t help but notice the palette of nautical language you use throughout. As a family, you “counted time in waves” while your dad, a ship captain, was away. You woke in the morning after sleepwalking “salt-white.” Meanwhile, your mother was a “strobing lighthouse of missing.” The language is part of what makes the collection feel so beautifully cohesive. How did you build this vocabulary? Do you keep word lists? Or does the language come very organically to you?

  Febos: It’s more accurate to say that this vocabulary built me than I it. Sometimes I see my students, especially the ones with a gift for the lyrical, reaching far outside the realm of their own experience for language and images. I understand this impulse. We think, in the beginning, that striking exotic words together will create something entirely new. That we must be worldly in our vocabulary. We idolize the styles of other writers and don’t trust or perhaps yet know our own. I try to repeat as often as possible that they don’t have to write like David Foster Wallace or James Baldwin or Maggie Nelson—indeed, they shouldn’t. Those writers are doing it better than they ever could.

  A real turning point for me was when I began trusting the constellations of images and words that were intrinsic to my own world—the place where I’m from, the symbols that already populate my memory and imagination. Rilke talks about this in Letters to a Young Poet—staying close to the objects that define you and represent the world that only you know. I grew up on Cape Cod, beside a lake, with a sea captain father. So the images most evocative for me are of those worlds—water, the sea, the stars. Particularly in this book, I gave them room, because the book is so much about those places, how they created me. And the questions I was trying to answer with this book are questions that were born in those places. Of course, at some point in revision, I had to weed out the redundancies and choose the ones that hummed loudest with meaning. But when I tap into a place that feels true, where I can hear the stream running under the story, the language comes pretty easily. See? I’m doing it even here in this interview. It’s all watery and “constellations” of images. I’m rolling my eyes. But I think if you comb through any writer’s work who has a defined voice, especially those who write about their own lives, I think you see it—the words and shapes they come back to, because they are fused with the writer’s own unresolved (unresolvable) questions.

  Rumpus: In the book’s final essay, you say that in 2009 you had a dream about the Wampanoag tribe your birth father is descended from, and felt like you wanted to write the story. When you run the idea by your literary agent, he tells you, nah, readers “aren’t into Native Americans… Why don’t you write something more you.” The next hundred pages are a very satisfying fuck you (am I allowed to say fuck here?) to that, in which you delve into the history of the Wampanoag, the history of your birth father and his family, the intensity and unraveling of a romantic relationship in 2014, and the questioning of your own identity and to whom you belong. How long did it take you to write this? How much of it was written during the experience, and how much after with the gifts of hindsight? Were there questions you had at the beginning that you sought to solve by the end? Were there any parts of this essay that made you uncomfortable or fearful to write down?

  Febos: [Laughter] This question is like a shotgun shell, full of a million deadly pieces.

  One: It took me either thirty-four years or one year, depending how you think about it. The physical writing of the first draft happened largely over the course of a single month at a residency, where it hijacked me and wouldn’t let go.

  Two: During that time, I was still involved with the lover I describe, so I actually had to stop, and live the ending of our story before I could write about it. I’ve never written anything that close to living it. After we ended, I wrote furiously for a few months afterward and finished it. I don’t think I could have done this if I hadn’t known for a long time (in an inchoate way) that that end was inevitable.

  Three: Yeah, I had questions. Like, how is this going to end? Or, what is my connection to this stranger, my birth father, to this history, to this lover? Why have I done so many dark things? Why haven’t I ever had my heart broken? I wrote my way into all of the answers of that essay.

  Four: Did any of it scare me? EVERY. SINGLE. WORD. This essay terrified me. It still terrifies me. After I wrote the first draft, I sent it to a trusted reader, a close friend who’d been privy to all of the events as they had happened, and who I knew wouldn’t pull any punches. She said to me, “This is lovely, but it’s fiction. You wrote the version you were trying to convince yourself of the whole time. Or a version that no one will want to argue with, or be hurt by. You can do that, but it’s not what happened.” I was shocked. She was entirely right, but I hadn’t known I was doing that. I think that’s partly a result of writing it so close to living it—I was still attached to the old story, even though I knew it was a myth. I was not wholly ready to let it go. And then I was. I went back and rewrote it, and recognized how it felt to be truly honest. And I was terrified the whole time. I had to put into words the things I’d been running from my whole life. I mean, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. This is what writing memoir and personal essay includes. If it doesn’t feel at some point like peeling off your own skin, you’re probably not being honest enough.

Melissa Febos
Born: September 28, 1980
Nationality: American
Occupation: Memoirist
Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2011. From Literature Resource Center.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2017 Gale, Cengage Learning
Updated:May 26, 2011

Table of Contents

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PERSONAL INFORMATION:
Born September 28, 1980; daughter of a sea captain and a Buddhist psychotherapist. Education: Attended Purchase College and Harvard University; Eugene Lang College of The New School University, B.A.; Sarah Lawrence College, M.F.A. Addresses: Home: Brooklyn, NY. E-mail: melissafebos@gmail.com.

CAREER:
Writer and college teacher. SUNY Purchase College, Purchase, NY, lecturer, 2007--; Gotham Writers' Workshop, New York, NY, faculty, 2008--; New York University, New York, lecturer, 2009--; also instructor at Baccalaureate School for Global Education, Astoria, NY, 2006-07; instructor at Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, New York, 2007-08; and lecturer at Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, 2008-09. Founder of Prospect Writes, New York, 2009--; and cofounder, cocurator, and host of monthly music and reading series, Mixer Reading and Music Series, New York. Spent four years working as a professional dominatrix; previously worked as a chambermaid, a boatyard hand, babysitter, dishwasher, and waitress.

AWARDS:
McDowell Colony fellow, 2010; first place winner of the Memoirs, Ink half-yearly contest, 2010.

WORKS:

WRITINGS:

Whip Smart (memoir), St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2010.
Contributor of essays, stories, journalism, poems to periodicals, including the Chronicle of Higher Education Review, Hunger Mountain, Sadie, Front Porch Journal, Rambler, Southeast Review, Redivider, and Cape Cod Life. Contributor to Web sites, including New York Times Online, and Bookforum.com.

Sidelights

Melissa Febos dropped out of high school at age fifteen and home schooled herself for the next year. Then, at the age of sixteen, she moved from her family home on Cape Cod to Boston, where she worked as a waitress and attended night school at Harvard University. In 1999 she moved to New York and attended the New School University and went on to receive an M.F.A. in writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

Although the author made the decision to become a writer when she was seven years old, she noted in an interview on her home page that she never thought she would be writing about being involved in a notorious profession. In her memoir, Whip Smart, Febos writes about her four years working as a professional dominatrix and overcoming a drug habit, all the while attending college and graduating with honors. Although she considered publishing her memoir under a pseudonym, Febos commented in her home page interview that she felt it was important to pen her memoir under her real name because part of the book's theme is the importance of avoiding living a secret life.

"Overall, Whip Smart is an intriguing and informative book that explores the many types of addictions, while giving you a unique perspective into the word of the sex industry," wrote Kimberlie Wiese for the MC Reviews Web site. Noting that "Febos's electrifying prose and unremitting honesty continually challenge the reader," a Kirkus Reviews contributor added that the author "expertly captures grace within depravity."

According to Febos, she became a dominatrix after answering an advertisement in the Village Voice looking for a young woman to work as a dominatrix and role play as a nurse. The job required no experience or having sex with the customers, and it paid seventy-five dollars an hour. In an interview with Alyssa Fetini for the Time Online, Febos explained why she took the job. Noting that her primary way of making money since she was a teenager had been working in coffee shops, the author said: "I [actually] went looking for the ad. I already had it in my mind that I wanted to be a dominatrix. It represented the potential for a double life and I'd always been drawn to that. In the beginning, I thought of myself as a cultural anthropologist--a student of human behavior. I was also sick of making lattes."

Febos worked as a dominatrix in midtown Manhattan in a commercial "dungeon." Writing in the introduction to Whip Smart, the author notes: "What began as a job became a life, and my most captivating secret of all. Behind that unmarked Midtown door, I uncovered hiding places that I hadn't known existed in me, and whose contents weren't easy to behold. Ultimately, though, when I did, it surprised me to find that my own dark underside wasn't so strange or sick as I feared."

According to Febos, most of her clients were professional men in position of power. The author told Marie Claire contributor Abigail Pesta that these were "men who told people what to do all day and wanted someone to boss them around." The author points out, however, that her clientele came from a wide range of professions. "My client base consisted of stockbrokers, lawyers, doctors, rabbis, grandpas, bus drivers, restaurateurs and retirees," the author noted in an interview with Alicia Rancilio for the Washington Examiner Online Web site.

While much of the book focuses on her work as a dominatrix and the variety of her clients' requests, from tooth pulling to squishing bugs with her feet, the author also writes about her youth and her addiction to heroin, an addiction that she supported with her wages as a dominatrix. In an interview with the Frisky Web site contributor Jessica Wakeman, the author commented that writing about these two taboo subjects--being a dominatrix and a drug addict--was "equally challenging," adding: "But as far as the sex work part, for me, that required a lot of self-examination." The author also noted in the interview: "I've learned some unexpected things about myself." As for the drug addiction, Febos told Wakeman that, "in order for me to get clean, I had had to already investigate those motives and those parts of myself and my psyche. So, it wasn't that difficult to write about why I was an addict or what that experience was like, but it was more intense to relive those experiences, actually. Writing about using and shooting up was pretty intense."

Tebo writes in her memoir that her work as a dominatrix initially gave her a strong sense of power of confidence. "At first, I thought, I'm playing this very powerful role. I'm bossing men around; I have all the power," Febos told Marie Claire contributor Abigail Pesta. "After I did it for a while, I realized that I was really conforming to ... [their] fantasies." The author went on to tell Pesta: "And so it started to dawn on me that I wasn't really in control."

Whip Smart describes how Febos eventually started attending Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in an effort to overcome her drug habit. She writes that overcoming her addiction to being a dominatrix turned out to be much more difficult. Febos explains that she only got out of the business after facing her own demons, including her depression and some basic truths about who she really was.

"The thing that strikes us the most about Febos' memoir, is how it all ends," wrote a contributor to the Seattlest Web site, adding: "Rarely do these stories have happy endings, or do you hear about women pulling themselves up by their bra straps, getting clean, and quitting the 'industry.'" Calling Whip Smart a "candid, hard-slogging debut," a Publishers Weekly contributor also wrote that the author "mines the darkest, most troubling aspects of human interaction."

In an interview on the Lemondrop Web site, the author commented on the questions she is asked most about her time as a dominatrix. People often asked about her family's knowledge of and reaction to her profession. Febos noted in the interview that she first told her brother but had a much more difficult with her parents. Febos commented: "Then I told my mom, which was harder. She accepted my argument for it, how empowering it was, but I knew she wasn't comfortable. I told my dad last. What father wants to know that about his daughter?"

FURTHER READINGS:

FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

BOOKS

Febos, Melissa, Whip Smart, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2010.
PERIODICALS

Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2010, review of Whip Smart.
Marie Claire, February, 2010, Abigail Pesta, "Punishing Work: Melissa Febos Spent Three Years Whipping Rich Men for Money," interview with author, p. 78.
Publishers Weekly, January 18, 2010, review of Whip Smart, p. 40.
ONLINE

Baltimore Sun Read Street Web log, http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/books/blog/ (March 8, 2010), "Melissa Febos' Whip Smart."
Frisky, http://www.thefrisky.com/ (April 21, 2010), Jessica Wakeman, "Frisky Q & A: Melissa Febos, Ex-Dominatrix and Author of Whip Smart: A Memoir. "
Gotham Writers' Workshop Web site, http://www.writingclasses.com/ (October 2, 2010), "Profile: Melissa Febos."
Lemondrop, http://www.lemondrop.com/ (April 6, 2010), "10 Things You Don't Know about My Life as a Dominatrix," interview with author.
MC Reviews, http://reviews.media-culture.org.au/ (July 2, 2010), Kimberlie Wiese, "Addicted to Control--Whip Smart by Melissa Febos."
Melissa Febos Home Page, http://melissafebos.com (October 2, 2010).
New York Online, http://nymag.com/ (February 26, 2010), "Former Dominatrix Melissa Febos Can't Drive without Compulsively Imagining Her Own Bloody Dismemberment," interview with author.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (April 2, 2010), Rebecca Keith, "The Rumpus Interview with Melissa Febos."
San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, http://www.sfbg.com/ (March 15, 2010), "Melissa Febos Whips It Good," interview with author.
Seattlest, http://seattlest.com/ (March 26, 2010), "Whip Smart's Melissa Febos at Elliott Bay Books."
Time Online, http://www.time.com/ (March 19, 2010), Alyssa Fetini, "Inside the Secret World of a Dominatrix," interview with author.
Time Out New York Online, http://newyork.timeout.com/ (October 2, 2010), review of Whip Smart.
Village Voice Fork in the Road, http://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/ (March 26, 2010), Keith Wagstaff, "Melissa Febos--Former Dominatrix--Talks Food Fetishes, Sexy Vegetarianism, and the Allure of a Tube of Cookie Dough."
Washington Examiner Online, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/ (March 12, 2010), Alicia Rancilio, review of Whip Smart.*

PW talks with Melissa Febos: there's a reason we don't say certain things out loud
Jackie Thomas-Kennedy
Publishers Weekly. 263.48 (Nov. 28, 2016): p58. From Literature Resource Center.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Full Text:
Febos's second book, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury; pub month, Feb.; Reviews, Sept. 19), examines the many loves of her life--lovers as well as family--with her distinctive blend of lush language and relentless intelligence.

There's a line in the book about not being able to trust your own stories. Have you ever started writing, then recognized you weren't telling the truth?

Truth is just skin-crawlingly uncomfortable, isn't it? So yeah, I did. I think with almost every essay in the book, there was some moment when I cracked and realized that I had to sink down to a deeper level of honesty about it and I panicked--and then I did it. The title essay was definitely the hardest. I had intended that it be about 40 pages long, and it was about 150 pages. I sent a draft to two very trusted readers. Both of them came back and said, "This is lovely, but this is not what happened." My one very close friend said: "I was there, I was on the phone while this was happening, this is a beautiful story and it's a story that the other people in it will be comfortable with, but it's not the true story. So if you want to write a beautiful story that nobody's mad about then this is great. But if you want to do what I know you do in your writing, then you have some work to do and you have to get real."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Why wait so long to tell us your ex's name? We see her on the first page of the collection, but we don't see her name until the last essay.

Particularly in the first half of the book, she was this sort of universal love object--the beloved. She was this fantasy that I was craving and chasing, and that I think I meant to compare to my other beloveds, to all my beloveds, and to the way that my parents were beloved to each other, and the way the sea was a beloved of my father. I think in some ways the book is about that consuming craving for the perfect love object, and no one can ever be that. It's like a craving for God or something--something more than human.

Do parts of your own memoirs seem hard to believe?

I'm no longer retroactively shocked and terrified by my own drug addiction and having been a dominatrix. When I write about something, I tend to exorcise whatever sort of demons or unresolved little caves of feeling in me that I have on reserve. I clean it all out when I write, and so that material doesn't scare me anymore. The love stuff still scares me. When I was writing Abandon Me, it was almost unbearable sometimes to have to put to words things that I did and ways that I felt. Those feelings and those acts were the woman I least wanted to be up until that point in my life--it was my worst nightmare. Thankfully, I think your worst nightmare coming true can be the best thing that happens to you. There's a good reason why we don't say certain things out loud, but in order to write about it the way I wanted to write about it, I had to name it as directly as I could.

--Jackie Thomas-Kennedy

Febos, Melissa: ABANDON ME
Kirkus Reviews. (Dec. 15, 2016):
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Febos, Melissa ABANDON ME Bloomsbury (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 2, 28 ISBN: 978-1-63286-657-8

An award-winning nonfiction writer explores the personal roots of a powerful and destructive love/hate relationship she shared with a married lesbian. As a child, Febos (Creative Writing/Monmouth Univ.; Whip Smart, 2010) suffered from separation anxiety and nightmares, and she sleepwalked whenever her sea-captain father was away. When she was awake, she routinely "counted all the dangers my father might meet" and feared that she might be found unlovable enough that he would never return. Febos took solace in erotically charged stories that, as in the 1986 film Labyrinth, merged fantasy and horror. But in her teenage and young-adult years, her escapist tendencies took the forms of sexual obsessions with men and women and a drug addiction. When Febos met Amaia, a beautiful married lesbian who lived on the other side of the country, the attraction was immediate and intense. Amaia wooed her with expensive gifts that reminded her of the gifts her father would bring back to her. She writes, "each object was a promise, something I could hold when I could barely remember her face." Caught in a web of obligation and desire that was as pleasurable as it was disturbing, Febos began a cross-country relationship that, in its secrecy and impossibility, was profoundly erotic. Her lover made Febos feel worshipped; Febos, in turn, found herself idolizing her lover. Yet at the same time, the author also experienced a primal fear of abandonment that came from Amaia's physical, and at times emotional, unavailability. Her understanding of the relationship was heightened by her own coming to terms with the part-Native American, substance-abusing biological father she never knew growing up. With Amaia, she experienced both the paternal genetic legacy of addiction as well as the traumatic "legacy of abandonment, of erasure" that was her birthright as a Native American. Erotic and dark, the book is a courageous exploration of love as the ultimate form of plenitude and annihilation. A lyrically visceral memoir of love and loss.

Abandon Me
Publishers Weekly. 263.38 (Sept. 19, 2016): p57.
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* Abandon Me

Melissa Febos. Bloomsbury, $26 (320p) ISBN 978-1-63286-657-8

Febos's (Whip Smart) second memoir is part lovesick devotional and part meditation on the intersection between desire and identity. She outlines the progression of a doomed relationship in exquisitely romantic detail ("Her mouth the soft nail on which my life snagged, and tore open") alongside the story of reconnecting with her birth father, a Wampanoag Native American and "career drug addict and alcoholic." As she explores her native roots through the lens of historical trauma and cultural erasure, she finds an explanation for a viscerally felt absence and her willingness to be "colonized" by a controlling lover. She captures the contradictions of female sexuality, complicated further when the object of one's desire is another woman, and delves into the push and pull of the other relationships that molded her, as with her adoptive father, a sea captain whose fierce love and frequent absence were contradictory formative influences: "Every time he left port, we wrecked again." Her mastery over metaphor is astonishing: describing a moment of heartache, she writes, "I was the sound of breaking. Pedestrians and bicyclists looked around, covered their ears." What might be mere navel-gazing for a less brilliant author is made powerfully universal here. Though the particulars are hers, just about anyone can relate to the feeling of a chasm opening up inside. Febros's awakening to her full identity, even its ugliness, is a powerful and redemptive epic. Agent: Ethan Bassoff, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. (Mar.)

Book World: A dominatrix finds real life doesn't have safe words
Sibbie O'Sullivan
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Byline: Sibbie O'Sullivan

Abandon Me: Memoirs

By Melissa Febos

Bloomsbury. 308 pp. $35

---

There's a certain type of female experience that's cultivated by the memoir-publishing industry: an unstable "girl" coming-of-age following - pick one or more from this list: an abusive childhood, drug abuse, poor choice of mate, an anxiety disorder, divorce. Wrap it up in a pretty publicity photo, and you have yourself a book. Having an MFA helps, too.

Melissa Febos' first memoir, "Whip Smart" (2010), perpetuates this preselected (and very limited) view of female experience by chronicling the four years she worked as a dominatrix in New York as a way to pay for her drug habit and college. Her second memoir, "Abandon Me," covers more terrain by discussing familial concerns, a heated but unhealthy love affair and the need to understand her complex ethnic heritage. But the ride is bumpy. In chapters full of shifting characters, time frames and allusions straight out of cultural studies, we learn that Febos' early life was shaped by the fear of abandonment.

The Puerto Rican man she calls "my sea captain father" adopted her after marrying her divorced mother. Frequently absent because of his work, he was a loving dad when home. Her half brother was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and her mother became a psychotherapist who belatedly recognized her son's issues and eventually divorced the sea captain. Febos hit puberty early, liked both boys and girls, and left home (Falmouth, Mass.) at 16. Soon she turned to drugs: "Even the fiery melt of crack was an emptying: inhale it and exhale the unseen self in a smoky swarm." Then came the whips and chains. Later are wrenching scenes involving her controlling lesbian lover, and Febos' tentative reconnections with her biological father, a Native American who himself is "a career drug addict and alcoholic."

Somewhere in this dramatis personae there's an interesting story, even a compelling one, given how it crisscrosses so many ethnic and social lines of American history. Febos is a talented writer with a colorful personal history, but her short scenes and forced juxtapositions leave readers yearning for more connections and continuity.

Why does Febos feel as she does? Poetic technique, allusions and cultural references can't bolster rather ordinary experiences: loneliness, bad romances, throwing up. Also, do we need to know about Imago Theory, Theodule-Armand Ribot, the theory of "psychic mechanics" and "intergenerational transmission of emotional trauma through amygdala-dependent mother-to-infant transfer of specific fear"? These academic digressions dilute instead of deepen the reader's understanding of Febos' abandonment, and they make for stilted reading.

Febos' best writing is unmediated: "My story did not include regret until thirty-two," she writes, when "I came to truly know my own fear." Or, describing the moment when she meets her birth father: "My stomach clenched. Like a hovering wasp, his nearness made my shoulder smart." Here are real, lived experiences, and we gobble them up.

"Abandon Me" is a step up from the lurid "Whip Smart," because Febos links her self-investigation to larger adult concerns of family obligations and healthy loving. But her "bad girl" image still prevails. When she tells her agent she wants to write about Native American history, he advises her instead to keep it "edgy" and "urban," as that's what sells. Unfortunately, what sells frequently typecasts and discounts female experience. A young woman wants to attend college but needs money for tuition. Will she pick up a whip or a student loan application? If she writes as well as Febos, and if she has a fearless agent, perhaps her memoir just might be a big seller. Readers await.

---

O'Sullivan, a former teacher in the Honors College at the University of Maryland, writes about culture and the arts.

"Melissa Febos." Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2011. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CH1000200692&it=r&asid=bb2d4b0cd833e3b475648d3108b38807. Accessed 9 Mar. 2017. Thomas-Kennedy, Jackie. "PW talks with Melissa Febos: there's a reason we don't say certain things out loud." Publishers Weekly, 28 Nov. 2016, p. 58. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473149941&it=r&asid=2a596e15134a249abdbca048746b8a2a. Accessed 9 Mar. 2017. "Febos, Melissa: ABANDON ME." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473652185&it=r&asid=811c67b3d4038f372c1150cacd839064. Accessed 9 Mar. 2017. "Abandon Me." Publishers Weekly, 19 Sept. 2016, p. 57. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464352749&it=r&asid=c38ee9772073f2cf95dd02c4fcc96edb. Accessed 9 Mar. 2017. O'Sullivan, Sibbie. "Book World: A dominatrix finds real life doesn't have safe words." Washington Post, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483619600&it=r&asid=2d4eb27b514ce67f4ef9aa2dd097530d. Accessed 9 Mar. 2017.

• South China Morning Post
  http://www.scmp.com/culture/books/article/2075429/book-review-abandon-me-memoirs-uneven-ride-through-new-york
  Word count: 731

  Book review - Abandon Me: Memoirs is an uneven ride through a New York dominatrix’s complicated life and loves
  In her first memoir, Melissa Febos chronicled her time as a dominatrix, and now she delves into her complex family background and an unhealthy love affair, but can’t let go of her ‘bad girl’ image
  PUBLISHED : Friday, 03 March, 2017, 7:02am
  UPDATED : Friday, 03 March, 2017, 7:02am

  The Washington Post
  The Washington Post
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  Abandon Me: Memoirs
  by Melissa Febos
  Bloomsbury
  3 stars
  There’s a certain type of female experience that’s cultivated by the memoir-publishing industry: an unstable “girl” coming of age following an abusive childhood and/or drug abuse, a poor choice of mate, an anxiety disorder, divorce. Wrap it up in a pretty publicity photo, and you have yourself a book. Having a Master of Fine Arts helps, too.
  Melissa Febos’ first memoir, Whip Smart, perpetuates this preselected (and very limited) view of female experience by chronicling the four years she worked as a dominatrix in New York as a way to pay for her drug habit and college.
  In pictures: the Japanese art of rope bondage, as practised in Hong Kong

  Her second memoir, Abandon Me, covers more terrain by discussing familial concerns, a heated but unhealthy love affair and the need to understand her complex ethnic heritage. But the ride is bumpy.

  In chapters full of shifting characters, time frames and allusions straight out of cultural studies, we learn that Febos’ early life was shaped by the fear of abandonment.
  The Puerto Rican man she calls “my sea captain father” adopted her after marrying her divorced mother. Frequently absent because of his work, he was a loving dad when home. Her half brother was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and her mother became a psychotherapist who belatedly recognised her son’s issues and eventually divorced the sea captain.
  Director James Foley talks S&M and shooting Fifty Shades Darker

  Febos hit puberty early, liked both boys and girls, and left home in the US state of Massachusetts at 16. Soon she turned to drugs: “Even the fiery melt of crack was an emptying: inhale it and exhale the unseen self in a smoky swarm.” Then came the whips and chains. Later are wrenching scenes involving her controlling lesbian lover, and Febos’ tentative reconnections with her biological father, a Native American who himself is “a career drug addict and alcoholic”.
  Somewhere in this dramatis personae there’s an interesting story, even a compelling one, given how it crisscrosses so many ethnic and social lines of American history. Febos is a talented writer with a colourful personal history, but her short scenes and forced juxtapositions leave readers yearning for more connections and continuity.
  Why does Febos feel as she does? Poetic technique, allusions and cultural references can’t bolster rather ordinary experiences: loneliness, bad romances, throwing up. Also, do we need to know about Imago Theory, Théodule-Armand Ribot, the theory of “psychic mechanics” and “intergenerational transmission of emotional trauma through amygdala-dependent mother-to-infant transfer of specific fear”? These academic digressions dilute instead of deepen the reader’s understanding of Febos’ abandonment, and they make for stilted reading.
  Febos’ best writing is unmediated: “My story did not include regret until thirty-two,” she writes, when “I came to truly know my own fear.” Or, describing the moment when she meets her birth father: “My stomach clenched. Like a hovering wasp, his nearness made my shoulder smart.” Here are real, lived experiences, and we gobble them up.
  Abandon Me is a step up from the lurid Whip Smart, because Febos links her self-investigation to larger adult concerns of family obligations and healthy loving. But her “bad girl” image still prevails. When she tells her agent she wants to write about Native American history, he advises her instead to keep it “edgy” and “urban”, as that’s what sells.
  Unfortunately, what sells frequently typecasts and discounts female experience. A young woman wants to attend college but needs money for tuition. Will she pick up a whip or a student loan application? If she writes as well as Febos, and if she has a fearless agent, perhaps her memoir just might be a big seller. Readers await.

• Lambda Literary
  http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/02/05/abandon-me-by-melissa-febos/
  Word count: 764

  ‘Abandon Me’ by Melissa Febos
  Review by Sara Rauch
  February 5, 2017

  It’s easy to fall in love with Melissa Febos’ gorgeous new memoir of short essays, Abandon Me. Over the course of the eight pieces contained within, Febos brings a relentless curiosity and startling intimacy to the page.

  The first seven pieces in Abandon Me are short—essays you might discover in high-tier literary magazines (where, indeed, many of them first appeared) and never forget—and they cover a remarkable amount of ground: coming of age, addiction, heartbreak, identity, music, tattoos, psychology. Despite this, the collection feels layered rather than scattered: the pieces are threaded together by a captivating, abusive love affair and the tenuous relationships Febos strikes with both her adoptive father and her birth father.

  In the opening essay, “The Book of Hours,” Febos writes: “Our favorite stories can be like lovers. Make sense to me, we ask them. Make sense of me. Here, fix these hurting parts. And stories do, sometimes better than our lovers.” This intertwining of fierce desire, pain, seeking, and storytelling runs throughout Abandon Me. Abandon is, not surprisingly, an important theme, neither in the sense of being abandoned (by family and friends, by society or the world) nor abandoning oneself (to love, drugs, literature, madness).

  As the book progresses, Febos’ wisdom continues to expand. In “Labyrinths” she uses the cult classic Labyrinth and Greek mythology as means of examining her drug addiction and her brother’s struggle with bipolar disorder. Through this, she eventually discovering that, “The Minotaurs we need to rescue are never our half brothers. They are always those monstrous parts of ourselves.” In “All of Me,” the pain and sweetness of Billie Holiday’s music meld with the pain and sweetness of marking one’s body with ink and needle: “The thing about pain is that it pins you to the moment, to your body.”

  The eighth, title piece comprises the second half of the book—were this fiction, we’d call it a novella—and delves more deeply into the stories Febos has expertly set into place in the earlier essays. Here we meet Amaia—the seductive, dangerous lover—more fully, their love affair unfurling painfully and beautifully, over many months. And we meet Jon—Febos’ biological father—in real time, as Febos struggles with her desire to know and be known by the family whose Native American blood she shares.

  “Abandon Me” is brutal both in its honest portrayal of human need and of the things we do for love, for recognition, for safety: “I suspect anyone is capable of anything under the right circumstances. We don’t want to believe this. We want identity to be solid, but even science proves that it is reactive, changing all the time. …We are in constant collaboration with our contexts.” Over the course of “Abandon Me,” Febos’ relationship with Amaia falls apart, while her relationship with Jon knits itself, often uneasily, together. Like all the earlier pieces in the book, there are many threads holding this memoir together—astronomy, geology, Native identity, history—and like the other pieces in the book, “Abandon Me” circles an essential question: How do I write my story? If there is an answer to this, Febos comes close: “You must face a truer version of it. You must look at the parts that hurt, that do not flatter or comfort you. That do not spare you the trouble of knowing what made you, and what into.”

  Many memoirs fail because in their insularity: the story becomes so focused on the writer’s experience that the rest of the world, and thus truth, falls away. But in a good memoir, like Febos’, the story becomes a means of imparting knowledge, both of the writer’s experience and the world at large. No matter the subject, in her stories Febos lays the world she lives in bare—“In them,” she says, “I become a woman who can look at things. Who knows what to do next and how.” This world is undoubtedly intimately hers, and yet with her careful observations and introspection, she transcends isolation and captures the boundless nature of human emotion. Abandon Me is a fierce exploration of love and obsession, but it is something else as well—the story of woman who is unafraid to explore the harsh truths and choices that shape our lives.

  - See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/02/05/abandon-me-by-melissa-febos/#sthash.xyLfdj76.dpuf

• Chicago Review of Books
  https://chireviewofbooks.com/2017/03/02/abandoning-expectations-with-melissa-feboss-abandon-me/
  Word count: 732

  Abandoning Expectations with Melissa Febos’s ‘Abandon Me’
  Posted on March 2, 2017 by Erynn Porter
  9781632866578_f7853Recently, Melissa Febos wrote an essay called “The Heart-Work” in Poets and Writers, which focused on writing about trauma as a subversive act. The heart of the essay is about how women not only should write their own stories, but that there is a real need for it. The essay is an argument against the idea of navelgazing, something that seems to come up often as a criticism of women writers. It is also an argument against the idea that writing can’t be therapeutic and that readers wouldn’t be interested in anyone’s story of self examination and discovery.
  Abandon Me is an exploration of self-discovery. Febos’s collection of memoirs explores not only the act of abandoning, but also different types of love and growing up. In the beginning, it’s easy to feel very distant from Febos even though she’s sharing intimate aspects of her childhood. She wrote about them in a way that seems like she wasn’t writing about herself. Instead she was a writer telling someone else’s tale. It almost feels like she is trying to protect herself from future readers; if she doesn’t reveal everything, then she won’t be hurt like she has so many times in the past.
  Instead of following Febos, you follow many of her personas. By the end of the book, however, you finally start seeing Febos the woman. Not her many personas—the studious child, the addict, the dominatrix, the cool writer, the sexy lesbian—but just Febos at her most vulnerable and interesting core self.
  In many ways, Abandon Me echoes Leslie Jamison’s essay collection, The Empathy Exams. Febos meditates over the concept of abandonment quite like Jamison meditates on the idea of empathy. Both authors write at length about her childhood, astrology, Greek myths, her past job of dominatrix, and her relationships—yet abandonment is always trailing behind. Where Abandon Me departs from The Empathy Exams is that Febos focuses more on the inward struggle than Jamison. She goes deep into her childhood when living with her stepdad, the sea captain. Febos sketches in staggering detail her adolescent of abandonment: her biological father leaving her mother, and then her stepdad disappearing for months at time for his job. She writes about how she slowly closes herself off. One of the most powerful images she describes is how her mother would cry every time the sea captain left, and how Febos would hold her mother, dry-eyed and stoic.
  The true strength of the collection is in the titular memoir, which takes up half of the book. If it was done any other way, it would have seemed tedious and scattered. Instead, it feels more like we are wandering through a period of Febos’s life when she was lost. The memoir is the map. In “Abandon Me,” she slowly starts to loose herself as she starts a new relationship. At first it is fun despite being forbidden because the woman is married. Soon, however, the woman separates from her partner and focuses only on Febos, who abandons her identity as the relationship becomes toxic. She stops talking to friends, stops going out, and spends most of her time at the beck and call of the other woman. As a reader, one inevitably feels close to Febos as she struggles with what is her fault and what her partner is trying to blame on her. As she wrestles with her toxic situation everything else starts to click into place. Eventually Febos realizes she abandoned herself for the sake of the relationship and that realization had only made her strong enough to break it off and find herself again.
  NONFICTION – MEMOIR
  Abandon Me by Melissa Febos
  Bloomsbury
  Published February 28, 2017
  Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart. Portions from Abandon Me have won prizes from Prairie Schooner, StoryQuarterly, and the Center for Women Writers, and twice earned notice in the 2015 Best American Essays anthology. Febos serves on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Monmouth University and on the M.F.A. faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She lives in Brooklyn.

• Paste
  https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/03/melissa-febos-intimate-memoir-abandon-me-will-tap.html
  Word count: 649

  Melissa Febos' Intimate Memoir Abandon Me Will Tap Into Your Fears
  By Bridey Heing | March 1, 2017 | 2:00pm
  BOOKS REVIEWS MELISSA FEBOS
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  Melissa Febos' Intimate Memoir Abandon Me Will Tap Into Your Fears
  Melissa Febos’ secrets are widely known. As she points out in her new collection of essays, Abandon Me, to read her available work is to understand intimate details about her life. She documented everything from her sex work to her drug addiction in her first memoir, Whip Smart, and her sophomore book highlights the dark influence of her desires and fears with a similar vulnerability.

  Abandon Me reads chronologically in only the vaguest sense. Each essay’s backbones take us through Febos’ life—from her childhood on Cape Cod waiting for her sea captain father to her heroin addiction in her early twenties to an emotionally abusive relationship in her early thirties. The essays leap back and forth in time, overlapping to create a Venn diagram that gradually reveals a complete picture. At the point where the essays meet sits Febos herself, a woman willing to confront challenging questions about her life with openness and honesty.

  1abandonmecover.jpgFebos’ birth father was an alcoholic, and her mother left him and met another man who raised Febos as his own. These family bonds became a source of pain as Febos grew into a teen, during which time she started to engage in near passive sexual behavior; the line between what she wanted and what she allowed out of a desire to be wanted is unclear. Febos eventually dropped out of high school, became addicted to heroin and started working as a dominatrix (a career that was by turns empowering and exhausting). All of these scars are laid bare in her writing, twisted and turned for the reader to examine.

  What is most striking about this collection is Febos’ ability to hold many moments of her own life in conversation. Influences like Labyrinth and Carl Jung’s Red Book are woven into interrogations about her drug addiction or her search for security. These threads are so intertwined that it’s impossible to separate the young girl reading picture books with her father from the heroin addict cradling a phone on her shoulder in case she needs to call 911 as she shoots up. “This is the same person,” Abandon Me demands the reader understand.

  The titular essay is the book’s longest, describing in alternating passages Febos’ relationship with her birth father and her long-distance relationship with a woman named Amaia. Amaia is abusive—manipulative and controlling, condescending and unbending. It is painful to read about Febos giving in to Amaia’s power, accepting her gifts and her constraints in equal measure.

  It’s in this essay that Febos dissects the meaning of abandonment, illuminating her essays in an unexpected light. The word “abandon,” Febos learns, has a dual nature, with etymology connecting it as much to the idea of being left behind as to the idea of giving up power or land or authority. Abandonment, in this light, is a theme in Febos’ life; she fears her father will abandon her, she abandons herself to drugs, she becomes a vessel for men to abandon themselves to desire. In her relationship with Amaia, Febos proves willing to abandon her identity to receive a controlling woman’s love. To abandon or to be abandoned is a constant shifting of power and perspective.

  Febos’ writing is unflinching, and her willingness to delve into her darkest corners avoids becoming overwhelming only because she handles it with strength and delicacy. Abandon Me finds the universal in her own story and taps into many people’s fears, pushing the reader to question what they might abandon themselves to or let themselves abandon.

• Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2017/02/abandon-me-by-melissa-febos/
  Word count: 1138

  ABANDON ME BY MELISSA FEBOS
  REVIEWED BY KEA KRAUSE
  February 16th, 2017

  Some of the truest things I’ve read have been at the intersection of personal essay and reportage, where studied and reported fact casts light on a writer’s most private experiences. This confluence of different types of truth is the strongest element of Melissa Febos’ new book of essays, Abandon Me, a collection exploring her many inheritances, from her love of books to her addiction to heroin.

  I found it difficult to pace myself as I read Abandon Me. The first seven pieces serve as a primer for the final, 173-page, titular work. The book takes place over the course of a courtship in which the writer’s lover, Amaia, is married. Febos examines this relationship by mining the details of the affair and relics of her past lives—her childhood, her family’s collapse, and her addiction to heroin. In “Leaves Marks” she serenades the hickeys bestowed upon her neck; in “Wunderkrammer” she examines her Amaia’s propensity for gift giving and possession. With each new piece Febos bends time. As she explores her past, recalling her brother’s struggles with mental health or her family’s trip to Egypt to visit her sea-captain father, she builds on the story of her fraying relationship with Amaia, with each essay serving as a foundation for the next. Febos obsesses, gets lost, and alienates her friends and family. You start to worry.

  Her final essay, “Abandon Me,” moves quickly, filling in the spaces of the first seven pieces. Where the previous essays kept a tight focus on the details and themes of a particular experience, this piece opens up and gives us the landscape of this period in Febos’ life. As her relationship with Amaia becomes unsustainable, she relocates Jon, her biological father, and begins visiting him, despite her trepidation. The definition of abandonment comes into focus after exploring its possible meanings as they relate to her life. She has a heritage—Jon is a Wampanoag Indian—that takes on new relevance to her, despite it having been a part of her all along. Febos’ world implodes and regenerates simultaneously. To make sense of the destruction, she applies other sources of knowledge—movies, constellations and images, science and psychology—and effectively deepens the resonance of each experience she includes. When Jon stands in the middle of the road waving Febos off after an afternoon visit, the gesture feels so impotent that you recognize all the times you’ve been disappointed by something that is too little, too late.

  For me, some of her most resonant passages come in the first essay, “The Book of Hours.” Shifting through different parts of her life, Febos describes the shelter she has always taken in stories. “Our favorite stories can be like lovers,” she writes. “Make sense to me, we ask them. Make sense of me. Here, fix these hurting parts. And stories do, some times better than our lovers.” There are nights she and Amaia read aloud to one another. Their stories are a home, a salvation. Later in the book, Febos recalls searching for her own identity. “I read the dictionary looking for a definition that fit. I took personality tests in magazines. I read horoscopes. I scoured the DSM-IV. I scrutinized the gaze of others, of mirrors, of lovers.”

  Hunting for your own identity, it turns out, never ends. You start to recognize the girl in this book and the woman who is writing it as yourself. It occurs to you that you’ve always felt like a story and a horoscope were similar in the sense that both have the omniscience to tell you something about yourself. In her close reading and recording of her own life, Febos universalizes the pain of waiting—for her father at sea, for Amaia to leave her wife—and the need to tell and be told biographically affirming stories.

  *

  “How are you liking it so far?” My boyfriend, who is also a writer, asked me after a couple days curled up with the company of my black cat and Abandon Me.

  “It feels like it’s giving me permission to do something,” I told him. It was a vague answer that I failed to clarify. He shot me a look. “I don’t know what but it has to do with writing,” I said.

  After finishing the book and wanting more Febos, I saw that she had reviewed Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, a book that had crossed my mind a number of times while reading Abandon Me. Febos opens her review by confessing to being accused of writing too much about love, a revelation that causes her to feel embarrassment. Write about your life, our critics tell us, and you risk your work being brushed off and categorized as narcissistic. In her discussion of Nelson’s work, Febos addresses the stigma attached to writing about your own life and, incidentally, about permission. Febos nails this insecurity when she writes, “most of us inclined to write [personal narrative] worry our stories, imagining a threshold of confession that, if crossed, will invalidate our intellectual pursuit of ideas and answers and reduce us to diarists.” The Argonauts, and Nelson’s erudite alacrity, gave Febos new license over parts of her life, granted her permission to live without self-consciousness, to keep writing about her much-revisited topic: love.

  But, for me, there was another similarity. The Argonauts is so acutely intimate and so legitimately intelligent that it leapt off the rails of whatever I perceived “memoir” to be at the time. The way Nelson conversed so fluidly with philosophers and feminists to make sense of her own period of family-building, the way she elevated her story to something much more than just a pregnancy memoir—it situated her story in a timeline of humanity. Febos, given permission by Nelson to tell whatever story she wants, holds herself to the same standard of perspicacity.

  “Personal transformation and intellectual discourse are not mutually exclusive,” Febos writes about Argonauts. This was the first of two permissions I received when reading Abandon Me. The second was permission to turn the interrogation inwards. No subject is off-limits to Febos. She authorizes her reader to be braver, to dig deeper into their own secrets and to research those secrets in history. It is the act of keeping secrets that is dangerous, not the act of telling them. Confession is freedom. In combining research with her narrative, Febos is staking claim to her own existence, something on which Febos reflects in her book, writing, “All my life I had insisted: I am, I am, I am.”

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