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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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Melissa Febos
Age: 44
Born: 1980
Born: September 28
Journalist
Writer
Ideas
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Afraid
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Anyway
More quotes by Melissa Febos
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
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
All our stories are part invention - the way we've decided to make sense of what has happened.
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
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
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
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
Children's stories force logic upon the gruesome facts of our lives. They mirror our troubles and submit them to a chain of causality.
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
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
Abandonment by a lover won't kill us. But it awakens the parts of us that remember when it could.
Melissa Febos
You can turn off the song the way you cannot the actual experience.
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
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
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
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
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
Most of the smart things I've ever thought or written came vis-a-vis my body.
Melissa Febos
I see consensual S&M no differently than I see consensual anything: as beautiful, and never any one thing.
Melissa Febos
