Quote

The craft work becomes a mediator between me and my secrets, between me and the listener.

Melissa Febos

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Melissa Febos
Age: 44
Born: 1980
Born: September 28
Journalist
Writer
Craft
Crafts
Secrets
Becomes
Secret
Mediator
Work
Mediators
Listener
Listeners

More quotes by Melissa Febos

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Abandonment by a lover won't kill us. But it awakens the parts of us that remember when it could.
Melissa Febos
Image
I do believe that we all have these stories inside of us, these scars that we compulsive worry as we do wounds, and that drive for redemption, to change the story or resolve it, governs a lot of what we do in love. We are irresistibly drawn to opportunities to reenact those traumas out of a desire to heal, not to punish ourselves.
Melissa Febos
Image
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
Image
I tell my students all the time is, for better or worse, no publisher is going to come wrench your story out of your hands before you're ready to let it go. You will have time to take stuff out. You don't have to show it to anybody. That's what I did.
Melissa Febos
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The story of the memoir is a story of me creating certain narratives so that I could live with my own experience and with the uneasy relationship between what I was doing and what I believed in - or what I saw as an uneasy relationship between those two things.
Melissa Febos
Image
I have replaced my instinct for secrecy with an instinct for confession.
Melissa Febos
Image
Most of the smart things I've ever thought or written came vis-a-vis my body.
Melissa Febos
Image
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
Image
You don't have to write like David Foster Wallace or James Baldwin or Maggie Nelson - indeed, you shouldn't. Those writers are doing it better than you ever could.
Melissa Febos
Image
I see consensual S&M no differently than I see consensual anything: as beautiful, and never any one thing.
Melissa Febos
Image
Our lives are a long series of acquiring and then sloughing narratives.
Melissa Febos
Image
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
Image
All our stories are part invention - the way we've decided to make sense of what has happened.
Melissa Febos