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I'm always writing to a younger version of myself, or a young woman who is like I was. I want that girl to know that I really existed and that it all went down that way.
Melissa Febos
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Melissa Febos
Age: 44
Born: 1980
Born: September 28
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More quotes by Melissa Febos
We often think that bad relationships are motivating by self-loathing or a wish for self-destruction, but I think that loving people who hurt us is more tied to a profound and earnest wish to soothe ourselves and recover from older hurts. And I've also found that having empathy for that urge is the best way to move through it, and beyond it.
Melissa Febos
Abandonment by a lover won't kill us. But it awakens the parts of us that remember when it could.
Melissa Febos
All our stories are part invention - the way we've decided to make sense of what has happened.
Melissa Febos
I see consensual S&M no differently than I see consensual anything: as beautiful, and never any one thing.
Melissa Febos
I think that's the job of the writer, right? Not to introduce new ideas or feelings, but to name the ones we know most intimately but are afraid of speaking, or don't have the words. That's what I find most powerful anyway.
Melissa Febos
You can turn off the song the way you cannot the actual experience.
Melissa Febos
I am secretive. Always have been. And one way that secrecy manifested in my early life was that I was adept at juggling multiple social realities: I could get by no problem in many social arenas (including that of high school), but also felt alienated and totally uninspired by everything that happened there.
Melissa Febos
The craft work becomes a mediator between me and my secrets, between me and the listener.
Melissa Febos
Being celibate was so wonderful. It taught me a lot about love, but even more about my own self outside of love. I'd never met myself out of love before, really.
Melissa Febos
New York at night, from its bridges, is a miracle. When I first came to the city, it took all my fantasies and set them on fire, turned them into flickering constellations of light.
Melissa Febos
I could not kick heroin to save my life, literally, until I started telling my secrets. It was some of the clearest evidence I've ever found of anything. It was the only immediate change in behavior I've ever undergone. I told the most frightening truths, and I was free.
Melissa Febos
Letting go of the cozy stories you've been carrying around is devastating. But there's more room for new stuff after you do it.
Melissa Febos
I can still discern people's weaknesses, but it doesn't make me want to exploit them it makes me want to hug them.
Melissa Febos
Anyone who makes a life of what they love is a hero to me, and it's important for those people to be visible in every kind of life, every kind of love, every kind of work.
Melissa Febos
The frustration of being marginalized often gets misdirected at the most visible members of one's own community, because they are more accessible than the real agents of marginalization.
Melissa Febos
The other reason I didn't want to fictionalize it is because one of the main points of publishing a memoir in nonfiction was that I wanted to write about what had been a very lonely experience. The books that most saved my life as a kid were the ones that articulated lonely experiences that I had thought were mine alone.
Melissa Febos
Our lives are a long series of acquiring and then sloughing narratives.
Melissa Febos
When I was in college I started writing prose, because a very smart professor asked me what I like to read and I said, Novels, and she said, You should be writing them then. Memoir never even occurred to me. I think I was afraid of nonfiction and I was afraid of navel-gazing, and of being seen.
Melissa Febos
Music isn't seeking to comment on the experience or transmit some finding about it - it is only seeking to express it. The vicarious experience is much more accessible. We all recognize the sound of that howling, because we all have a similar howling inside of us, however we heed it or hold it or muzzle it or repress it or live in bondage to it.
Melissa Febos
Fiction stymies me with its possibility. I can't see the bottom and I freeze, cling to the side, or just choke. In nonfiction, particularly that which takes personal narrative for its primary topic, I have a finite space and a finite amount of material. I can't fabricate material, I can only shape and burrow into it.
Melissa Febos