Melissa Febos | Writers' Voices

Author and associate professor, Melissa Febos, visits Writer’s Voices to introduce her memoir, Girlhood. Newly published in paperback, Girlhood is a collection of personal essays detailing the deepest, most intimate parts of her life. “I would say that Girlhood is… it takes the experiences of my adolescence, particularly around sexuality and body image, and really…dissects the lessons and conditioning and patterns that were established at that age and tracks them as they play out into adulthood, and really…asks the question of what it takes to undo that conditioning to free yourself from those patterns as an adult, and of course I talked to a bunch of other women, but…the core of it is memoir.” In her book, Febos not only shares her stories, but also other people’s stories. “…I knew that my experience was just a narrow sliver of possible girlhood and I wanted to have the voices of people who had different kinds of experiences. People who came from different class experiences, different race experiences, different… body experiences. I didn’t want to speak for other women. So I wanted to have their voices in the book.”

She also discusses her struggles with addiction early on, her path to becoming a writer, and the differences between writing a novel versus a memoir. “I could write fiction if I wanted to. I could push it into the realm of invention if that felt right, but it just almost never does. There is something about being bound to what happened… honestly, I think it is about boundaries in a way where it’s like, the limited nature of experience…pens me in artistically in a way that makes the writing a kind of puzzle, right? I can’t just invent my way out of a difficult thing. I have to work with what happened and I have to figure out how to make meaning out of what happened, and the side effect of that is that it gives me insight into my own experience, and however painful that is, it always feels worth it to me, it feels incredibly precious to me… and so I just can’t stop doing it.”