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A lot of the experiences I write about could be described as grasping for boundaries, trying to find the limits of things.

Melissa Febos

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Melissa Febos
Age: 44
Born: 1980
Born: September 28
Journalist
Writer
Things
Described
Boundaries
Experiences
Limits
Write
Find
Writing
Trying
Grasping

More quotes by Melissa Febos

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All our stories are part invention - the way we've decided to make sense of what has happened.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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
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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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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
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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.
Melissa Febos
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I have replaced my instinct for secrecy with an instinct for confession.
Melissa Febos
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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.
Melissa Febos
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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.
Melissa Febos
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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
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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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Most of the smart things I've ever thought or written came vis-a-vis my body.
Melissa Febos
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I see consensual S&M no differently than I see consensual anything: as beautiful, and never any one thing.
Melissa Febos
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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.
Melissa Febos