Melissa Febos's Girlhood Is a Book Every Woman Should Read
Every once in a while, a book comes along that feels so definitive, so necessary, that not only do you want to tell everyone to read it now, but you also find yourself wanting to go back in time and tell your younger self that you will one day get to read something that will make your life make sense. Melissa Febos’s fierce nonfiction collection, Girlhood, might just be that book.
Febos is one of our most passionate and profound essayists, and in this follow-up to 2017's Abandon Me, she crafts an assemblage of memoir-cum-cultural-criticism that dissembles many of the myths women are told throughout their lives: that we ourselves are not masters of our own domains, that we exist for the pleasure of others, and so our own pleasure is secondary and negligible.
When we’re young, Febos writes, “we learn to adopt a story about ourselves—what our value is, what beauty is, what is harmful and what is normal—and to privilege the feelings, comfort, perceptions, and power of others above our own.” Girlhood, then, lays bare the process of unlearning this most deeply ingrained lesson of female adolescence and offers us exquisite, ferocious language for embracing self-pleasure and self-love. It’s a book that women will wish they had when they were younger, and that they’ll rejoice in having now.
“The true telling of our stories,” Febos writes, “often requires the annihilation of other stories, the ones we build and carry through our lives.” The author’s goal is to scorch the patriarchal earth, allowing herself and other women to reseed it with narratives in which they cast themselves as the main characters. Febos dances deftly between her own autobiography and exposing the pervasive social history that marked—sometimes literally—her personal experiences and those of many, many women.
Febos is a balletic memoirist whose capacious gaze can take in so many seemingly disparate things and unfurl them in a graceful, cohesive way. In an essay about how the many different kinds of mirrors (actual reflective surfaces, yes, but also movies, novels, lovers, and friends) can both reveal and elide a woman’s true self, she amalgamates the experience of teaching Jamaica Kincaid’s ubiquitous prose poem “Girl”; a linguistic history of the word “slut”; an embarrassing childhood anecdote set at a pool party; a comparative analysis of Edith Wharton’s novel House of Mirth and the Emma Stone-led movie Easy A; and a story of young, summer-camp love.
In “Intrusions,” she uses the film Body Double to frame a harrowing episode in which she’d been repeatedly peeped on by a male trespasser. It’s an incident she at first blamed on herself: “Had I unknowingly done something to court the midnight lurker?” She had been a “precociously developed eleven-year-old” who’d been spat on and followed home by a boy on the school bus. As a teenager, she had been, more than once, the unwitting yet silent recipient of gropes from older men. She had been a professional dominatrix who also liked to get herself off in private. “I had turned myself into a sight,” Febos writes, “Of course the stranger had looked.”
“The belief in our own culpability encourages our silence,” she says, “and our silence protects the lie of our culpability.” We are so often taught that our worth rests solely in being wanted that we become convinced we are, at any and every moment, performing for those that might want us. And if we’re eliciting, consciously or not, that attention, then why should we be anything other than delighted when we get it?
Indeed, Hollywood has churned out numerous movies in which a woman being watched by a man is a form of romantic courtship. Of course, Febos’s story of being stalked didn’t end that way; she moved to a new apartment and tried to forget about it. The unfortunate mundanity of this happening made it easier to dismiss. It was, Febos concludes, “but one in an endless series of ordinary violations against which I felt impotent to protect myself, except retroactively, in my own words, from many years’ distance.”
Such is the power and necessity of Febos’s collection: to protect ourselves, even retroactively, with her words and our own, against the tarnish and harm of having our agency stripped from us.
The book is not doom and gloom, though. At its heart, it is a liberating celebration of erogenous autonomy, of sex, of what Audre Lorde in “The Uses of the Erotic” referred to as “the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” As a child, Febos had taken pleasure in her own physicality, a pleasure that waned as she got older, and much of these memoirs chronicles her journey back to that place of corporeal joy. Part of that passage involved a celibacy pact she made with herself, a period of time during which she “experienced a radical change in my relationship with my body,” and part of it involved finding a partner who loves her “for exactly the things I have tried to erase in myself.” In a book that rejects familiar narratives, the romantic tale Febos portrays—love of self before love of someone else—is one readers will swoon over.
Intellectual and erotic, engaging and empowering, Girlhood is a coming of age story of sorts that’s less about how a girl becomes a woman than it is how a person goes from embodying “that shimmer, that man-sourcing of self, that vaporous need to please” to loving one’s body on one’s own terms, “a firework work gone off in the dark, a spectacle of disobedience, a grand finale of orgasms any time I want.”
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