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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.

Melissa Febos

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Melissa Febos
Age: 44
Born: 1980
Born: September 28
Journalist
Writer
Shouldn
Indeed
Baldwin
Writers
Wallace
Write
Maggie
Better
Foster
Ever
Nelson
Writing
David
Like
James

More quotes by 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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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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Our lives are a long series of acquiring and then sloughing narratives.
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You can turn off the song the way you cannot the actual experience.
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I have replaced my instinct for secrecy with an instinct for confession.
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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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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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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 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.
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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
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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.
Melissa Febos
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All our stories are part invention - the way we've decided to make sense of what has happened.
Melissa Febos
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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.
Melissa Febos
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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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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
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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 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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The craft work becomes a mediator between me and my secrets, between me and the listener.
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