REVIEW: Melissa Febos' Girlhood
by Franny Marzuki
Melissa Febos photographed by Beowulf Sheehan
“It is better to choose your pain than to let it choose you,” a young Melissa Febos tells herself in the opening to her second essay collection Girlhood.
This phrase repeats with slight variation throughout the essay “Prologue: Scarification” as a pulsing refrain, a musical heartbeat carrying the reader through a winding account of moments from Febos’ childhood. This prologue both primes and disarms the reader, giving a brief catalog of injury that forefronts the body while pulling us close to that injury by narrating in the second person. By writing from this perspective, she eliminates any illusion of the comfort offered by distance from the very beginning, forcing us to experience these moments along with Febos herself. This opening comes from a narrator that feels distinctly young. It’s as if we begin with the Febos from her childhood, who would rather invite hurt than fall victim to it. This idea of choosing pain as a way of healing is the premature conclusion that the rest of the collection works to unravel.
The eight essays of this collection are acts of uncovering, a practice of searching and finding. Febos works through her own personal experiences growing up as a woman, such as the self-loathing she inflicted on her body and the unwanted desire that was projected on it by men whom she felt compelled to please. She then combines her personal narrative with interviews she conducted with other women about their experiences, many of them mirroring her own. This makes her essays feel expansive. While we often linger in moments from Febos’ life, each is integrated into a larger narrative about society—whether that be another woman recounting her sexual assault, a reflection on Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth, a catalog of media that glamorizes stalking, a retelling of the myth of the Hecatoncheires, or a meditation on Henry Harlow’s experiments conducted on monkeys about skin hunger.
Febos isn’t just describing a personal struggle, but the struggle of an entire gender that faces a society that emphasizes the comfort of men over women and that values physical appearance above all else.
The entire collection is written with calculated devastation. Many moments tear through the reader’s skin, exposing a hurt or fear that was long concealed. This line from the essay “Kettle Holes” has stayed with me even weeks after reading it: “There is no good strategy in a rigged game. There are only new ways to lose.”
However, as much as this book lingers in difficult topics, it is also largely a book about love in its multitude of forms.
“Wild America” explores Febos’ romantic relationships, both good and bad, and her relationship with her body. The larger topic of nature rests beneath these explorations as a sort of grounding center, a place to return. She focuses on the shared sublimity inhabited by love, sex, the body, and nature. “I’m sorry, I whispered and squeezed my own shoulder. I love you, I said.”
In “Les Calanques,” Febos chronicles her brief but powerful friendship with a French man named Ahmed as they bond over their shared addiction. “I wanted to tell Ahmed that I loved him, because I did. We were in a kind of love, I think: the kind that two lonely people with similar hearts and the same problem can fall into; the kind that has nothing to do with sex.”
In my favorite essay of the collection, “Thesmophria,” Febos explores her relationship with her mother. Specifically, she explores how love drove her to hide the most painful parts of herself from her mother as a means of protection. “It is so painful to be loved,” Febos writes. “Intolerable, even.” She tells their story parallel to that of Demeter and Persephone, emphasizing the idea of leaving—or perhaps, more accurately, being taken—and returning. Just as Demeter’s grief brought on the first winter, the magnitude of love Febos’ mother has for her is palpable through the writing.
This collection begins and closes with a confrontation of her younger self. In the prologue, we begin in her voice, commanding herself through injury. In the concluding essay, Febos imagines her twenty-year-old self watching her as she attends a residency in Cassis. It reads almost as an acknowledgment, an acceptance, of her past. While she carries it with her, allowing it space within her present life, it is no longer who she is.
Melissa Febos dissects girlhood, ripping it apart until we are left with only its beating heart. By the end, she hands the reader an essay collection lush with bodily experiences, cultural analysis, media criticism, and classical myth. Relentless in its emotion and saturated with truth, Girlhood will leave you breathless and raw, feeling both that a chasm has been open in your chest and that a hand has been extended to pull you out.
Girlhood by Melissa Febos comes out on March 30th. For information on where to find it visit Febos’ website at https://www.melissafebos.com/girlhood