Home. It is an appropriate place to start a conversation with Melissa Febos about her writing. Much of her work, whether in the form of memoir or essays—or some altogether different, hybrid form of creative nonfiction distinctly her own—begins and ends, somehow or another, here. In her first book, the memoir Whip Smart (Thomas Dunne Books, 2010); her first essay collection, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury, 2017); and now in her latest collection, Girlhood, published by Bloomsbury in March, Febos has drawn a map of her early life on Cape Cod so vivid and precise, readers are able to trace her route to the school bus stop in their mind’s eye. As a girl Febos greeted the squealing door of that bus with her head in a book, an act she devoted herself to in part because reading passed the time while her father, a merchant marine ship’s captain, was away at sea.
If this sounds like the stuff of fairy tales, that’s not far off. Born in 1980, Febos lived in the only room at the top of the stairs in a house very much like a cabin in the woods. From her attic window she could see through the skeletal branches of the trees to a kettle hole pond that plunged fifty feet at its heart and stayed chilly even in the summertime. That room, Febos says, “was my little world.”
“There was a moment during the writing of Abandon Me when I made a conscious decision to yield to the images and the place of my childhood, which was something I had resisted until that point. When I did they swallowed me.”
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der March - April 2021-Ausgabe von Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der March - April 2021-Ausgabe von Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Literary MagNet
When Greg Marshall began writing the essays that would become his memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It (Abrams Press, June 2023), he wanted to explore growing up in Utah and what he calls \"the oddball occurrences in my oddball family.\" He says, \"I wanted to call the book Long-Term Side Effects of Accutane and pitch it as Six Feet Under meets The Wonder Years.\" But in 2014 he discovered his diagnosis of cerebral palsy, information his family had withheld from him for nearly thirty years, telling him he had \"tight tendons\" in his leg. This revelation shifted the focus of the project, which became an \"investigation into selfhood, uncovering the untold story of my body,\" says Marshall. Irreverent and playful, Leg reckons with disability, illness, queerness, and the process of understanding our families and ourselves.
THE MEUSEUM OF HUMAN HISTORY
READING The Museum of Human History felt like listening to a great harmonic hum. After I finished it I found the hum lingering in my ears. Its echo continued for days.
The Sea Elephants
SHASTRI Akella's poised, elegant debut, The Sea Elephants, is a bildungsroman of a young man who joins a street theater group in India after fleeing his father's violent disapproval, the death of his twin sisters, and his mother's unfathomable grief.
The History of a Difficult Child
MIHRET Sibhat's debut novel begins with God dumping rain on a small Ethiopian town as though. He were mad at somebody.
The Sorrows of Others
AS I read each story in Ada Zhang’s brilliant collection, The Sorrows of Others, within the first few paragraphs— sometimes the first few sentences— I felt I understood the characters intimately and profoundly, such that every choice they made, no matter how radical, ill-advised, or baffling to those around them, seemed inevitable and true to me.
We Are a Haunting
TYRIEK White’s debut novel, We Are a Haunting, strikes me as both a love letter to New York City and a kind of elegy.
RADICAL ATTENTION
IN HER LATEST BOOK, THE LIGHT ROOM: ON ART AND CARE, PUBLISHED BY RIVERHEAD BOOKS IN JULY, KATE ZAMBRENO CELEBRATES THE ETHICAL WORK OF CAREGIVING, THE SMALL JOYS OF ORDINARY LIFE, AND AN ENGAGEMENT WITH THE NATURAL WORLD WITHIN HUMAN SPACES.
The Fine Print
HOW TO READ YOUR BOOK CONTRACT
First
GINA CHUNG'S SEA CHANGE
Blooming how she must
WITH ROOTS IN NATURE WRITING, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, POETRY, AND PHOTOGRAPHY, CAMILLE T. DUNGY'S NEW BOOK, SOIL: THE STORY OF A BLACK MOTHER'S GARDEN, DELVES INTO THE PERSONAL AND POLITICAL ACT OF CULTIVATING AND DIVERSIFYING A GARDEN OF HERBS, VEGETABLES, FLOWERS, AND OTHER PLANTS IN THE PREDOMINANTLY WHITE COMMUNITY OF FORT COLLINS, COLORADO.
