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Abandonment by a lover won't kill us. But it awakens the parts of us that remember when it could.

Melissa Febos

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Melissa Febos
Age: 44
Born: 1980
Born: September 28
Journalist
Writer
Parts
Kill
Remember
Awakens
Abandonment
Lover
Lovers

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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.
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Most of the smart things I've ever thought or written came vis-a-vis my body.
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The craft work becomes a mediator between me and my secrets, between me and the listener.
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I see consensual S&M no differently than I see consensual anything: as beautiful, and never any one thing.
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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.
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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.
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Our lives are a long series of acquiring and then sloughing narratives.
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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.
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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.
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I always wished I could go to confession. I was so full of things I couldn't name and had an instinct to hide. I felt burdened by the loneliness of my interior life. I wanted some container that I could empty myself into, some ear that would never be shocked, even if it offered me some kind of penance.
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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.
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I have always trusted writers, books, thinkers, psychologists in figuring things out. Maybe because they don't know me, so they are always honest, if that makes sense. Their wisdom and counsel are always unconditional.
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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.
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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.
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I can still discern people's weaknesses, but it doesn't make me want to exploit them it makes me want to hug them.
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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.
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Children's stories force logic upon the gruesome facts of our lives. They mirror our troubles and submit them to a chain of causality.
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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
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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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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