Abandon Me: Memoirs
by Melissa Febos
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"In her critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart, Melissa Febos laid bare the intimate world of the professional dominatrix, turning an honest examination of her life into a lyrical study of power, desire, and fulfillment. In her dazzling Abandon Me, Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection -- with family, lovers, and oneself. First, her birth father, who left her with only an inheritance of addiction and Native American blood, its meaning a mystery. As Febos show more tentatively reconnects, she sees how both these lineages manifest in her own life, marked by compulsion and an instinct for self-erasure. Meanwhile, she remains closely tied to the sea captain who raised her, his parenting ardent but intermittent as his work took him away for months at a time. Woven throughout is the hypnotic story of an all-consuming, long-distance love affair with a woman, marked equally by worship and withdrawal. In visceral, erotic prose, Febos captures their mutual abandonment to passion and obsession -- and the terror and exhilaration of losing herself in another. At once a fearlessly vulnerable memoir and an incisive investigation of art, love, and identity, Abandon Me draws on childhood stories, religion, psychology, mythology, popular culture, and the intimacies of one writer's life to reveal intellectual and emotional truths that feel startlingly universal."-- show lessTags
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Member Reviews
A coworker/fellow student introduced me to Melissa Febos and I *love* her - I've started reading everything I can get my hands on. We have such similar life paths it's bizarre (although now in our 40s, she's a professor and I'm an undergrad, lol). This was engaging and there was a lot for me to identify with in her, but it's not my favorite of hers. It starts off great but halfway in it starts getting agonizingly repetitious. I made it through to a delicious ending though, and then started on Girlhood. Maybe it's because it's a series of essays instead of a full narrative but I like it much better. Febos fan for life though.
While the narrative thread here is loose and frayed, the writing is beautiful, intimate and raw. She focuses mainly on three relationships: a mostly absent biological father, an adoptive, sea captain father, and a long-distance affair with a manipulative, married woman. As the title implies, she looks at how to cope when those you love are absent or unavailable. I'm also curious about her other memoir that looks at her time as a heroin addict and dominatrix in NYC. 😲
nonfiction/memoir essays (Puerto Rican/Native American ex-junkie suffers repeated heartbreak). Lyrical narratives that are sometimes interesting but that don't seem to go anywhere--I liked it ok, but I didn't find it to be all that entertaining or insightful.
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Reading Glasses Podcast
410 works; 3 members
Author Information
5+ Works 1,223 Members
Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart, the essay collection Abandon Me, and a writing craft book, Body Work. She is the inaugural winner of the Jeanne Crdova Nonfiction Prize from Lambda Literary and the recipient of Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Bread Loaf, and others. Her essays have appeared in show more the Paris Review, the Believer, the New York Times, and elsewhere. She is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program. show less
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- Original publication date
- 2017
- Blurbers
- Offill, Jenny
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- Members
- 191
- Popularity
- 170,602
- Reviews
- 3
- Rating
- (3.90)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 3
- ASINs
- 2
