Melissa Febos just dropped her third book into the world. Girlhood is a lyric and surprising essay collection that ruminates on some of Febos’s early experiences with sex, men and boys, and the legacy those experiences left on her and her view of the world. This fascinating and necessary collection of essays muses on being raised as a girl in America, while pulling back the curtain on the things we don’t talk about nearly enough.
M.D. McIntyre was able to chat with Febos—who recently relocated to the Midwest to teach creative nonfiction at the University of Iowa, and is busy writing a craft book set to come out in 2022—about Girlhood and all the influences that came together to help her form the collection.
M.D. McIntyre: I was jumping out of my chair most of the time I was reading Girlhood. I had to call my best friend three days in a row to discuss everything in it. We spent most of our twenties trying to sort out our early sexual experiences, which ranged from mildly traumatic to uncomfortable and painfully awkward. Like you, she developed early and was bullied terribly by boy on the bus—so your story really resonated with me, because those experiences made her really distrusting of people. I remember spending all of my early years trying to disappear so that I wasn’t the object men would try to possess, and so I wouldn’t be a threat to other women. It took years to unpack all that, and I can’t say I have read a book that addressed what happened and how it affected us until now. Your book, for me, was one of the first places I saw that specific dynamic on the page. You broke it open with a cultural and feminist analysis. It really feels like you pulled the curtain back on a very prevalent and devastating experience, and you make it really accessible. It made me curious if you write with an audience in mind? Or did you think about a certain reader for any of these essays?
Melissa Febos: I did think of that. I often think of that. It’s as if I’m thinking of my audience all the time, but I am also never thinking about them.
I have to believe that I have complete privacy in my process, because almost inevitably, I’m writing about things that I find somewhere between excruciating and impossible to talk about. And if I’m thinking about someone else reading it, I just— it won’t happen. I really do have to create a sense of aloneness with myself in order to start those conversations on the page.
At the same time, without the invisible presence of my imaginary readership, it would also be impossible for me to write these things. I have to have a conception of a reader who needs it. And that reader is almost always, basically, a younger version of myself. I’m not actually picturing my younger self, but I am picturing a young woman who is also having or had these experiences and finds them unspeakable. Someone who maybe is afraid that she’s the only one who has ever experienced it, or that those experiences have grown out of some intrinsic way that she is. I feel like there has to be a sense of urgency for me to write about uncomfortable things, and that urgency often comes from imagining someone who might need to read them.
It makes me so happy that you and your best friend were talking about it in this way. That was exactly what I was imagining. Because those events are totally ordinary things, but you don't know that when they’re happening to you. There’s a way that the self, who experiences those things and is shocked and harmed by them gets frozen and embedded in us—even as a 40-year-old feminist. I know that it is not the fault of 12-year-old girl to get treated that way. I’ve known that for decades. But until I talked to someone else about it, or tell that story, it doesn’t feel like I really touch it.
MDM: I was hoping to ask you about these common experiences being hidden. I was reading a review of Girlhood and they use the term “dark” to describe the book. I thought that was a really telling word. It seems as if these early sexual and vulnerable experience are kept in the dark, for everybody’s advantage, except that it’s not to women’s advantage.
MF: I totally agree. I do think people struggle with topics in the book, even people who might read the book and feel like it is illuminating aspects of their own experience. There is a very particular kind of language that gets attached to those things, and I think that carries a lot of power in the ways that we look at them and that it’s not accidental. We think of things as dark, and that our culture tells us we should keep in the dark, because it serves the dominant power structures that we don't talk about them.
I loathed describing the book to people as I was writing it because it sounded really obvious. I would say, “It’s a book of essays about how adolescent girlhood really fucks you up,” and people would be like, “Oh, yeah, totally.” But I really was trying to write into the weird little folds of experience that we don’t tend to talk about or excavate, because those experiences informed how we behave with adults.
MDM: Catalyzing events for essays or books is something that really interest me. Sometimes memoirs come from a prolonged experience—a relationship or a divorce, or a specific event, a trauma that happened in very specific moment in time. But I’m really interested in the subtle moments that spark a piece. There is this point in the book where you describe a conversation you had with your fiancé Donika where she gently probes you about your early sexual experiences and you had to question your view of the past—or at least to try to make sense of how she was viewing it. Did you find that your conversations with other women were a big part of writing this book or were even the specific catalysts for some of your essays?
MF: Absolutely. I can only speak for myself here, but one of the consequences of not talking about things is that my ideas are deprived as a kind of intellectual oxygen that allows them to change. When I talk about my beliefs, you know, these might be beliefs that had formed when I was a teenager or younger, at a point where I decided what I thought about a certain thing, and then, if I never talked about it again, I might have held on to that belief and not scrutinized or reconsidered it.
But as soon as I spoke to my own ideas out loud, and other people could ask questions or offer counter arguments or explanations on those ideas, my beliefs would just evaporate. I would realize that what I had thought was not at all what I thought anymore. That was definitely the case when I decided pretty young that so many of the girls and women who I was close to over the years had experienced horrific trauma and real violations. Since I didn’t experience that kind of trauma, I just made a decision—that is trauma over there. My experiences were pushed into the dark. All of these more nuanced experiences that did carry effects and consequences, they had a common ground with more serious trauma. But it just didn’t feel right to compare them. It wasn’t until my partner made me think about it. And I realized there is actually a lot of gray area between some of our everyday experiences and what we know how to name as serious trauma. So it was huge talking to other women through the course of writing this book. Even if the book had never gotten published, it would have been such an incredible gift to just have had those conversations and have my mind opened by those conversations.
MDM: There were so many things I latched onto in the book, but I think my favorite was a deeper exploration of the power dynamics between men and women, and boys and girls. There is a physical power dynamic, a social dynamic, and a cultural dynamic—some of this is kind of dark stuff. No one wants to say, “Oh, yeah, all of my early sexual experiences were awful.” We don’t want to say that, but for some of us it is very true. So I found it really cathartic as a reader to kind of see you pull all that out. In the essay “Thank You for Taking Care of Yourself,” what I really loved was when you got to “empty consent,” which I thought was a great term.
MF: I made it up!
MDM: That’s perfect, because I couldn’t really find the term anywhere.
MF: I love that you looked it up.
MDM: It made me really curious if there was an author, or a book or movie that helped you develop these ideas around consent or empty consent?
MF: Honestly, this is one of those essays where in the middle of writing it, I glimpsed the breadth of how big the topic could be. I started with this little tiny, granular experience, and thought, “Why did this happen?” Then I start scratching at it, and then it just started to open up, and I thought, “Am I going to have to write a book about this? I don’t want to write a book about this.” Luckily, I didn’t have to. But I did revisit Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.
I’m totally showing an empty place in my education here. But my partner and with friends who had more of a background in in philosophy, they told me to read it. Of course lots of the terms in it were really familiar to me. The idea that we are socially conditioned to discipline ourselves, to act in favor of the power structure that oppresses us, that all really stuck out for me. I understood it intuitively and had described it in my own words, and it was validating to read. It really is a testament to my relationship to theory, which is that I don’t experience it as something that is teaching me about my own experience, but it is giving me a really precise, more universal language for my experience.
Theory is often written by men, and so it is applying it in this global way that historically people haven’t done with women’s experience. So for me, as a reader of anything, my favorite moment is always one of recognition, when I see articulated something that I already know inside myself and that maybe I’ve already tried to put words to. So reading theory around consent and social conditioning was really helpful for me. It created a philosophical grounding for a very personal topic, and evolved as an organic thought process.
MDM: Girlhood certainly feels like a work of auto-theory, as you used feminist theory and cultural critique to find your way through some pretty difficult memories and personal narrative. Do you think that is an appropriate term to apply to your work? And do you think that decision was really conscious from the start, or did it emerge as you were writing?
MF: To the first part of your question, I generally don’t have a lot of attachment to how people describe my work in terms of category. It sort of seems like, not my business. You know? But I’m flattered, because auto-theory is a lot of what I like to read. It definitely was not a decision that I made at the outset of the writing process. I don’t think a lot about form before I start writing.
Before writing, I make lots of notes, and I read a lot. My incorporation of theory comes directly out of my own process of trying to understand something. The way I have always tried to understand my own experience is by reading, and trying to find descriptions of that experience that other people have documented. It was almost a surprise to me, when it started happening in my last book. I really think of essays as a thinking process delineated on the page. Not in a stream of consciousness kind of way. It is very crafted. It is an aesthetic object, but it is also a document of thought. So I think it made sense for me that my thinking pivoted. It made sense to start including theory in my own work, because otherwise I wouldn’t even know how to describe how I arrived at my own thinking, without other texts.
There are also ways that I resist auto-theory. I think sometimes I can use theory to hide from myself. We borrow an authority that maybe we don’t feel that we have with our own work. I think that’s okay sometimes, but mostly I want to avoid that. It feels important to acknowledge that I come to theory and I include theory in my work out of a place of unknowing, and that I don’t privilege that language and work over a sort of simple, straightforward description of experience, because a felt experience is as intelligent, and sometimes more intelligent, than the theoretical language.
MDM: I think the theory in a work like this can sometimes help the reader pause from being emerged in the personal narrative and pull the camera back to a larger view.
MF: I think that that actually was more of a conscious priority for me in writing this book. When I was writing my last book, Abandon Me, I was so I was deeply inside the experience I was describing in my own writing. It was hard for me to think about what I was going to do next. I didn’t have any kind of perspective. And in this book, I was writing mostly about experiences that had happened quite some time ago, so I had more control. I really did want to use my experience as a way to approach that broader view and to articulate something that I thought was very ordinary about my own experience, and make it very clear that they were not unique.
MDM: In Abandon Me, the focus is more closely on your father and your biological father than on your mother, whereas Girlhood examines your relationship with your mother. You openly discuss how hard it was for you to have your mother read your writing and to hear what you went through growing up. If you were giving a writer advice on how to write the really hard stuff, about our most complicated relationships, what would you say to them? Are there any tips you would give to other writers who are trying to get there in their writing?
MF: What has helped is that I have this ability to put emotional blinders on when I’m deep in the writing process. I am never thinking about what my mom is going to think when she reads it, because I care very much what she thinks. I feel really protective of her. But you would never know that by my writing, because it is full of things that I really wish I could have protected her from in many ways. There is a lot in the book that I don’t think parents are really meant to know about their children, at least not to that degree of specificity.
But I really do sort of have these little blinders that come on when I’m writing, and I’m just completely engrossed in the process. Which makes me able to write and analyze things that I have never talked about, that I couldn’t even start a conversation about. I have learned that is not possible for all writers. I do think it’s possible to practice, and work towards it. But it feels like a dark gift. I think it’s a gift that functions in in lots of negative ways in my life, where I’m very good at disassociating and being distracted too.
I have been able to live at the mercy of a mother who understand how we’re differentiated. My work is very painful for her to read a lot of the time, but she also has a really profound understanding of my autonomy, and that my path has been my path, and that she’s not responsible for it. When she read the book, a few times she called and said, “This is really hard. I wish there were so many things I could have protected you from.” And I always tell her, I don’t know if that would have been possible. Because I was tangling with powers that were much greater than either of us. One woman cannot protect one girl from the effects of the patriarchy. It is just impossible.
MDM: I would totally regret it if I didn’t ask how the illustrations came about and how that plays into the experience of reading Girlhood. I felt that it created some images for me that I might not have otherwise had. For example, “The Mirror Test” shows an image of a woman’s body. She appears to be slim, and in underwear and a bra—so I held that sort of “ideal female body” image in my head while I was reading. From a craft perspective, it was really neat because it drew my attention to each of the lines from the essays that she put next to the drawings. It felt like these lines echoed through the piece because of their space on the page with the illustrations. What was it like working with another artist on such a personal project?
MF: It was really fun. A little bit scary because one of the things I’ve always thought about being a writer is that I have no one else to blame but myself if things go wrong. But I also know that collaboration can be a joy. I’ve never really known how, outside maybe screenwriting, I would ever do that.
I collaborated with Forsyth Harmon, the illustrator for Girlhood, but actually we worked together for an essay that was first published in Tin House magazine and she did the illustration. It was a completely different illustration than what was in the book. So it was fun to see how my imagination combined with someone else’s imagination to create an image that was not anything that I had pictured. There is a part of me that feels some trepidation about giving the reader an image before they encounter the images in the essay themselves. But I really trust the human imagination, too. I trust the reader to come up with their own visual component. If those images didn’t work, people would come up with their own images.
It was really cool to talk to Forsyth as she was drawing them. Because the first iteration of the illustrations was very different, and they were little drawings scattered throughout the text. That was the first try, but then after Forsyth read the whole book, she came back to me and said, “This is all wrong.” She said those drawings felt too simplistic because it felt like the essays are intricate, and they have so many layers.
She decided on a constellation of images. She actually used the artist William Morris, who is also a poet and writer as an inspiration. He is associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement, and he illustrated Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and was known for the elaborate borders and incorporating a little bit of text. His work has these really beautiful, kind of whimsical, sometimes fantastical images that that represented each of the chapters or stories. I loved the idea of her making it into an illuminated manuscript, and the historical gravity of that form, which always felt like it was for very serious male writers. So to use that as a model, and interpret it through that lens, in a book about adolescent girlhood was kind of exciting.
MDM: That is wonderful. I was I was really intrigued by the illustrations.
MF: The illustration for the essay “Wild America”—the one with the little screaming hyena— he is my favorite. Forsyth actually has a novel that just came out in February from Tin House, called Justine. It is very short and very beautiful, all showing.
MDM: This last year I was reading Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit and Wendy S. Walters’s Multiply/Divide and I was really loving the forms in those essays. I really felt Girlhood had that magic. Do you have some books or authors that you think exemplify the contemporary style of essay—either ones you return to for your own writing or maybe a favorite one to teach?
MF: I actually love both of the books you mentioned. I actually taught from both of those books this semester. I also taught Anne Boyer’s The Undying, and Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive and it is so beautiful. Next semester, I’m teaching Claudia Rankine’s Don't Let Me Be Lonely. She is definitely one people are reading, but not that book so much and it is my favorite. It really epitomizes the way I understand lyric writing. I’ll be doing some Anne Carson too, and Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies, which I really love. I’m excited about Elissa Washuta’s new book coming out called White Magic. I could go on forever. There’s so many people doing great nonfiction work right now.
MDM: Now that Girlhood is out in the world, do you have time to focus on other projects?
MF: Everyone always tells you two things when you are about to publish books. First, don’t read reviews of your work. Good advice. Second, you should be working on the next book when your book comes out. I’m sure that is very good advice, but I’ve never been able to do it because I’ve been really busy publishing a book, and it is hard to maintain the kind of immersive practice that writing a new book requires while you are publishing a book.
But this time, as I was writing Girlhood, I thought to myself very clearly: When this book comes out, I really want know what my next project is, so I have a kind of refuge from the ego nightmare that is publishing a book. The universe totally delivered. There was this essay that I was planning on incorporating into Girlhood and it was the last essay I was writing, and it just got bigger and bigger, and I got more and more obsessed with it. It moved farther away from the content of the other essays, and then it just occurred to me: This is the next book. I need to let it have all the space it needs.
This next book is another nonfiction book and it is even more outward from my own experience. It does start with my experience, but it really is more journalistic. It looks backward into history and includes academic research. It starts with an experience where I spend a year intentionally celibate. I use that as a jumping off point to look at female celibacy more broadly construed throughout history and culture, but also the idea of divestment as a transformative personal and political process.
My friend of mine made a joke that I’m putting the sexy back in celibacy, which I thought was really funny.
MDM: That’s an amazing tag line—definitely going to sell the book. Melissa, thank you so much for talking with me.
Melissa Febos is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press, 2010), and the essay collection Abandon Me (Bloomsbury, 2017), which was a Lambda Literary Award finalist, a Publishing Triangle Award finalist, an Indie Next pick, and was named a Best Book of 2017 by Esquire, Book Riot, The Cut, Electric Literature, Bustle, Medium, Refinery29, The Brooklyn Rail, Salon, The Rumpus, and others. Her latest essay collection, Girlhood, was published by Bloomsbury in March 2021. A craft book, Body Work, will be published by Catapult in 2022.
M.D. McIntyre is a writer and researcher living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her writing has appeared in Fourth Genre, The Southampton Review, Rain Taxi, The Rumpus, Entropy, and other lovely journals online and in print. You can find her on Instagram @m.d.mcintyre.