A gripping set of stories about the forces that shape girls and the adults they become. A wise and brilliant guide to transforming the self and our society.
Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart, the essay collection, Abandon Me, and a craft book, Body Work. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, she is also the inaugural winner of the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary and the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The BAU Institute, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and others. Her essays have appeared in The Paris Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Granta, Sewanee Review, Tin House, The Sun, and The New York Times. She is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program.
Febos’s own voice is so irreverent and original. The aim of this
book, though, is not simply to tell about her own life, but to
listen to the pulses of many others’. In her author’s note, Febos
writes that she has ‘found company in the stories of other women,
and the revelation of all our ordinariness has itself been
curative.’ This solidarity puts Girlhood in a feminist canon that
includes Febos’s idol, Adrienne Rich, and Maggie Nelson’s
theory-minded masterpieces: smart, radical company, and not
ordinary at all.
*The New York Times Book Review*
Anyone who has ever been a girl or a woman will recognize the
patterns Febos uncovers: the unwanted touch, the expectations of
our bodies, the way we become complicit in the traps laid out for
us along the way by the patriarchal structures that govern so many
of our social, professional, and interpersonal spheres . . . By
following Febos' distinct paths between the past and present, we
might realize there's room to forge our own, and that we've just
been handed a flashlight that helps illuminate the way.
*NPR, "Books We Love"*
The harrowing nature of transformation is Girlhood’s core subject,
and in seven chapters Febos explores the interconnected aspects of
patriarchy and the marks that they’ve left on her . . . The book’s
centerpiece is a magisterial, seventy-six-page essay on what Febos
terms ‘empty consent’—not merely agreeing to unwanted sex, but the
ways in which women are programmed to collaborate in their own
diminishment . . . Febos has some idea of how to break this cycle .
. . She is also, perhaps, correcting the story of the girl-dreamer,
whose elegy, it turns out, may have been premature—she lives to
mother the woman.
*The New Yorker*
I wish I could have read Girlhood when I was young . . . Over the
course of eight essays with poignant illustrations by Forsyth
Harmon, Febos interrogates the strength, savvy and vulnerabilities
of girlhood . . . whether examining adolescent bullying and the
etymological roots of the word ‘slut’ or exploring the evolution of
consent against the backdrop of cuddle parties, Febos illuminates
how women are conditioned to be complicit in our own exploitation.
Like much of her scholarship, it begins with somatic knowledge of
the self.
*The Washington Post, "Best of the Year"*
In eight haunting essays, Melissa Febos unearths the trauma of her
adolescence as she picks apart the burdens that accompany being a
young woman. In sharing the darkness that clouded her coming of
age, Febos asks pointed questions about the expectations placed on
women and how they impact a person’s sense of self.
*Time, "Must-Read Books of the Year"*
Febos is an intoxicating writer, but I found myself most grateful
for the vivid clarity of her thinking . . . disquisitive and
catalytic--it doesn’t demand change so much as expose certain
injustices so starkly that you might feel you cannot abide them
another minute . . . I never once needed trigonometry and I
couldn’t find Catullus in a crossword these days, but Febos’
education is a kind I surely could have used.
*The Atlantic*
Febos combines personal, cultural, investigative, and scholarly
passages to ferociously dissect the lessons that shaped her, and
the result is a book that fills the educational void she’d noticed
. . . A guide for women to redefine themselves.
*Boston Globe*
Intellectual and erotic, engaging and empowering, Girlhood lays
bare the process of unlearning the most deeply ingrained lesson of
female adolescence—that we ourselves are not masters of our own
domain—and offers us exquisite, ferocious language for embracing
self-pleasure and self-love.
*O, the Oprah Magazine*
I read Girlhood in a long, marvelous guzzle and plan to teach it.
Its language and emotional candor deepen the conversation on
sexuality and the horrible liberties taken when we’re way too young
to consent. But there’s not an ounce of victim in Melissa Febos and
she’s a hero without ever trying to be. A classic!
*Mary Karr*
To counter society’s patriarchal standards and stereotypes enmesh
girls in a web of unreachable expectations of mind, body and soul,
Melissa Febos offers ideas to disrupt the normative narratives
surrounding girlhood and encourages us to recreate ourselves
according to ourselves.
*Ms.*
Drawing on personal history, cultural analysis, and investigative
reporting, Melissa Febos interrogates the meaning of girlhood, the
narratives we’ve been sold, and the realities of growing up a
woman.
*Buzzfeed, "Most Anticipated Books of 2021"*
Melissa Febos is a precise, visceral chronicler of what it means to
be a woman in the world . . . [Girlhood] is fierce and lyrical,
furious and tender; a vital read for anyone figuring out who they
really are, and have always been.
*Refinery29, "Best New Books"*
Melissa Febos brings lyric and merciless scrutiny to how women are
conditioned to accept misogyny as their due . . . By drawing upon
cultural materials for her kaleidoscopic investigation, Febos does
for girlhood what Maggie Nelson did for pregnancy in The
Argonauts.
*The Rumpus, "Most Anticipated Books of 2021"*
Her whole life, writer Melissa Febos has been forced to understand
her body primarily through other people’s conceptions of it. If
that sounds familiar to you, Girlhood--a mix of investigative
reporting, memoir, and scholarship around what it truly means to be
a young woman--might be right up your alley. (And if you’re a
parent struggling to understand what your teenage daughter is going
through, it’s safe to say this book might help.)
*Vogue.com*
This is a book you’ll wish you had in your youth, but one you’ll be
glad to have now.
*OprahMag.com, "Most Anticipated Books of 2021"*
Febos is a balletic memoirist whose capacious gaze can take in so
many seemingly disparate things and unfurl them in a graceful,
cohesive way . . . She dances deftly between her own autobiography
and exposing the pervasive social history that marked--sometimes
literally--her personal experiences and those of many, many
women.
*OprahDaily*
Febos' book forces us to linger in the nuances of sexuality,
gender, consent, and eroticism. Her essays dive deep into all those
gray waters of being a girl and then a woman: how self-loathing and
self-love can crash against each other, creating a certain kind of
dissonance that can take a lifetime to escape, if we ever do. If
there is a way out, it might be through books like this one that
give us a shared language for all the murky things we as women
feel--but too rarely speak.
*Popsugar*
Fusing memoir, cultural commentary, and research,
critically-acclaimed writer Febos explores the beauty and
discomfort of girlhood (and womanhood) in her newest essay
collection. With her signature lyricism and haunting honesty, the
essays explore the ways girls inherit, create, interrogate, and
rewrite the narratives of their lives.
*The Millions, "Most Anticipated Books of 2021"*
For her third book, Melissa Febos has turned the lens on her own
adolescence. Using a blend of theory and autobiography, she
recounts her difficult early sexual experiences and time spent as a
dominatrix and questions the patriarchal forces that shape the
collective girlhood narrative.
*Vulture (NY Mag)*
In each of Girlhood’s essays--which are accompanied by gorgeous
illustrations by artist/author Forsyth Harmon--Febos works to
interrogate her own behaviors as she navigates relationships, love,
sex, and addiction and, bolstered by research and interviews, comes
out the other side with a clearer understanding of what it might
take to make girlhood a less-destructive experience.
*Shondaland*
Febos is widely considered one of the most respected and beloved
contemporary essayists and memoirists, and a pillar of thought and
encouragement for other writers. The essays in her latest
collection read like sculpture: sentences chiseled and combined
into profound, moving works. Whether she’s writing about a
childhood soccer game or a cuddle party or a hike in France or sex
or Greek myth or addiction, her essays dance between philosophical,
humorous, and sensual.
*BOMB Magazine*
Girlhood is an exquisite collection. In lapidary, lucid prose,
Melissa Febos dissects the traumas, terrors, and pleasures of the
fraught passage from girl to woman. Febos’s insight is devastating,
the examinations of her world – from the female body, queerness,
consent, slut-shaming, and intimacy – are rigorous and
compassionate. This is a book for mothers, daughters, and our
deepest selves, a true light in the dark.
*Stephanie Danler, author of SWEETBITTER*
In this book, Febos proves herself to be one of the great
documenters of the terrible and exquisite depths of girlhood. Here,
that terrible and beautiful aeon is dissected, sung over, explored
like ancient ruins. These essays are moss and iron—hard and
beautiful—and struck through with Febos’ signature brilliance and
power and grace. An essential, heartbreaking project.
*Carmen Maria Machado, author of IN THE DREAM HOUSE and HER BODY
AND OTHER PARTIES*
Melissa Febos is part poet, part theorist, and all writer. In this
lyrical, searching, profound, and personal collection, Febos
examines childhood, femaleness, and love in its many forms with a
sensuous ferocity that is all her own.
*Ariel Levy, author of THE RULES DO NOT APPLY and FEMALE CHAUVINIST
PIGS*
Melissa Febos just revived me in the most spectacular way. Girlhood
blazes through the stories we've been told with a dazzling fury and
a brilliant beauty. Whatever we are or were, this is a map to a new
becoming. Between the intellect and the body a third term emerges,
dissolving binaries and reinventing the space of erotic power and
creativity. A fuck-all guide to resilience and reclamation, a
breathtaking reimagination of who we might be in spite of what
we've been told. Girlhood will bring you back to life.
*Lidia Yuknavitch, author of VERGE*
At once intimate and didactic, lyric and wise, Girlhood is a
must-read hybrid text for women looking to define themselves from
the inside. This book is an exorcism of social messaging and
external gazes, and Febos is a warm and erudite exorcist.
*Melissa Broder, author of THE PISCES and MILK FED*
Reading Girlhood felt like having a spell whispered into my ear.
You carve yourself, Melissa Febos writes, and the phrase becomes
command, elegy, incantation. In these pages she conjures not only
the past, but an allegory of experience at once universal and
exquisitely personal. Intimate, urgent, and stunningly beautiful,
this is a book that will be passed from hand to hand, from heart to
heart.
*Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author THE FACT OF A BODY*
American patriarchy teaches so many of us to hate our own bodies
and stifle our own desires—to make ourselves smaller in every way.
Girlhood is a smart, fierce, gloriously sensual critique of these
lessons by a writer who has fought hard to unlearn them. Thank you,
Melissa Febos, for charting this magnificent route of queer
feminist resistance!
*Leni Zumas, author of RED CLOCKS*
A gorgeously written, perfectly calibrated investigation into the
traps, paths, and challenges of being female in this world. It's a
stunner of a book.
*Jami Attenberg, author of ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS*
Lucid and timely...The great surprise of Girlhood is how
masterfully Febos reinvents the path to womanhood, a philosopher’s
eye turned protectively towards the tenderest parts of the writer’s
former self.
*Wendy S. Walters, author of MULTIPLY/ DIVIDE*
Vibrant, haunting, and absolutely unforgettable . . . A modern
masterpiece of brutally honest self-reflection.
*Bust Magazine*
What a delight it is to read the new book of a writer you adore and
be knocked out all over again. With Girlhood, one of the queer
community's favorite writers, Melissa Febos, has written her
career-best.
*The Advocate*
Girlhood, the dazzling new essay collection by Melissa Febos,
captures the potency of a woman’s adolescence--an experience that
is at once singular and universal, familiar and uncharted, ordinary
and remarkable. By plumbing the depths of her own coming of age,
interviewing other women about their early sexual encounters, and
interrogating depictions of female sexuality in literature and
film, the author unravels the stories women learn to tell--and
believe--about themselves.
*Guernica*
Girlhood is a striking assortment of essays that examine the
expectations of womanhood, the forces that perpetuate them, and
what it takes to reject these narratives and define one’s own life.
A genre-bending work that combines journalism, memoir, and
scholarship, Girlhood is a sincere and searing guide to
transforming the self and society.
*LAMBDA Literary, "Most Anticipated Books of 2021"*
Febos’s new collection could be thought of as a song--one whose
music speaks to girlhood, lost, now reclaimed. Regardless of
gender, one need be simply human to recognize the melody, however
faint, of the child lost to the invisible social structures in
which we are embedded.
*The Rumpus, "Most Anticipated Books of 2021"*
Mixing memoir, scholarship, and reportage, Girlhood, the third book
by Febos, is a gifted reckoning with and reclamation of the
author’s sensual and intellectual identity… Girlhood speaks aloud
the author’s silences, silences so firmly rooted in the psyche that
they have yet to be fully named. This book is the readers’ story as
much as it is the author’s.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
[Febos] picks at the ways women are taught to be “female” — and
what it means to remove oneself from such expectations. Febos’
lyrical, meditative writing makes it all the easier to ponder her
critical questions and explorations.
*San Francisco Chronicle*
How do you heal from the pain of growing up? This question,
refracted through a feminist lens, lies at the heart of Melissa
Febos’s essay collection, Girlhood. With psychological clarity and
emotional precision, Febos revisits the past to rewrite the
future.
*Columbia Journal*
Raw and unflinching, this dark coming-of-age story impresses at
every turn.
*Publishers Weekly, "Best Book of the Year"*
Profound and gloriously provocative, this book. . . transforms the
wounds and scars of lived female experience into an occasion for
self-understanding that is both honest and lyrical. Consistently
illuminating, unabashedly ferocious writing.
*Kirkus Reviews*
Melissa Febos’s writing is always luminous, fearless, and blazing
with intelligence.
*Lit Hub, "Best Reviewed Books of the Year"*
In Girlhood Febos not only offers herself a new playbook,
scrutinizing the assumptions she has placed upon herself, she also
examines how our culture prizes the narratives of boys over girls,
often erasing the girl altogether in favor of a more understandable
story. By looking at the social and cultural context in which we
become women, this multileveled narrative affirms that our shared
attitudes and beliefs about girls and the women we expect them to
become are more important than whatever benefits we gain by denying
and distorting them. Girlhood offers the plausibility that on the
other side of personal and collective awareness lies the choice to
play a different game.
*Chicago Review of Books*
Febos’s newest collection of essays addresses misogyny from the
inside out. . . With her signature rhythmic style and stream of
consciousness propelling the narrative, the author’s critique of
becoming is as tender as it is relentless. Febos’s writing
possesses the same heartbreaking elegance and haunting lyricism as
that of feminist authors Roxane Gay, Caitlin Moran, and Carmen
Maria Machado.
*Library Journal*
Combining intimate memoir with eye-opening cultural investigation,
Melissa Febos lucidly articulates the infuriating and redemptive
ways women's lives are shaped. These seven illuminating essays
unpack the experiences of living as a female under the destructive
influence of patriarchal norms and warped ideals of femininity.
*Shelf Awareness, starred review*
In this book of liberating inquiry and divine depth, Febos again
and again connects the constellations of herself and the world she
and all women must learn to live in.
*Booklist, starred review*
Anyone raised as a girl will be able to relate to something in
Girlhood, and those who weren’t will marvel at this book’s
eye-opening, transformative perspective.
*BookPage*
Girlhood is a book that deserves to be savored, to be read more
than once, to be given to all the people in your life — not just
the girls and women — because we are all responsible for ensuring
that every person be able to live by their own narrative.
*Washington Independent Review of Books, “Favorite Books of the
Year”*
Girlhood does what an essay collection should do at its best: offer
the reader a companion, fellowship beyond the aspirational profit
economy models of self-care. Girlhood is our girl, there for us,
sincerely and enduringly, as we begin to reconsider the
circumferences we may place on the stories we tell of
ourselves.
*Electric Literature*
[Febos] blends memoir, criticism, and interviews to expose the
seemingly normal parts of growing up as a girl that are actually
forms of conditioning. The way Febos describes her prepubescent
self and the unfiltered pleasure she once took in her own
physicality is poignant . . . [Girlhood] stimulates tears of
vicarious relief. Finally, someone has named the many invisible
ways young women are minimized—and, what’s more, we get to see her
renounce them.
*The Atlantic*
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