To Become A Kind Person Who Also Writes Books: Body Work by Melissa Febos

I follow a woman on Instagram, a striking former Bachelor contestant in Los Angeles named Bekah Martinez, who stopped shaving her legs and underarms when she had a daughter. “My family will not be a family that passes down shame,” Martinez wrote on Instagram in 2020, captioning a photo of her and her baby. “My daughter (and every other person for that matter) deserves to live in a world where they can exist in their natural body without feeling disgusting.” I used to think, looking at that photo, that I could never do that—stop shaving, I mean, but more than that, I could never, I thought, erase my desire to be admired, validated, and sought after by one set of the population (men). I enjoy (I think?) both the process and the result: the shaping, smoothing, and shaving of my body to be looked at and the reward of being desired. Or, wait—could I? Could I cede old desires to new ones? Namely, could I welcome into my life a new desire to be admired, appreciated, and respected not by men, but by the children I hope to have? I imagine it: A daughter who thinks, surveying my natural legs, that this is what beauty is, or, maybe, that this is not what beauty is, but who the hell cares? These are amazing thoughts to me. In fact, maybe I have been asking the wrong question: not could I do so but must I do so? What responsibility do I have to think through what I was taught and to teach a daughter something else? I live right now with my partner’s daughter, whom I met when she was two and who will be four soon. Like many questions I hoped to never have to answer, this question has ceased to be abstract.

I think about questions like these most often when I am proximate to Melissa Febos’ books, all of which are involved, more or less, in urging readers to become self-aware of the norms by which we are living, which, over our many years, have become so invisible to us that we mistake these constraints as our own choices. “Patriarchy,” she writes in Girlhood, her third book and a magnificent exhumation of the rage and regret of female childhood in patriarchal America, is “an elegant machinery whose pistons fire silently inside our own minds, and whose gleaming gears we mistake for our own jewelry.” Body Work, her latest, is a craft book. Organized into four slim chapters that cover, among other subjects, writing about other people and writing about sex, it answers many of the questions that readers of Febos’ earlier work might have about those books (for example, How did her ex-lover received being written about in Abandon Me? The answer: Badly). Body Work’s most fundamental premise, though, is an invitation to her readers to engage in similar work, after recognizing their own experiences as worth writing about no matter how much the mainstream overlords of writing might reject what they have to say as too niche; too overdone; or, Febos writes, mere “navel gazing.” “The stigma of victimhood,” Febos writes, “is a timeworn tool of oppressive powers to gaslight the people they subjugate into believing that by naming their disempowerment they are being dramatic, whining, attention-grabbing, or else beating a dead horse.” She continues, “Believe me, I wish this horse was dead.”

Yet Febos is not asking for just any story about the horse that is sexual assault, that is motherhood, that is girlhood. No, her ask, and the one that justifies the book’s use of “radical” in its subtitle, is not just that her reader become a writer, but rather that she become a kind person who also writes books. By this I mean someone who has thought through her own motives for living the way she does; for narrating her life the way that she does; and who has worked hard at neither living out, nor writing down for someone else, the narratives that constrict, disempower, or shame. The kind of writing Febos would like to see in the world—writing excised of its “tics and defaults,” writing in which every single choice is considered—begins in a body already trying to live the world that we would like to see realized. “I urge you,” she writes, “to hold your life and work to this higher standard.” That body, the body writing the books, is already living in conscious contradiction of its tics and defaults; that body, which makes radical art, is already alive to the origins, implications, and consequences of every choice that she makes. “It would be convenient in many ways if how we live did not so inform what we write,” Febos writes, “but of course it does.”

If this sounds intimidating, I assure you—as a straight white woman, trying to be both happy and ethical, with a mind awhir with gleaming gears of unattributed design—it is, but it also isn’t. What I appreciate about Febos’ project is that it is not so doctrinal as to paralyze. Febos, who is unfailingly a generous and compassionate writer, does not require of us women writers the wholesale rejection of the systems in which we grew up and from which we are as inseparable as anyone else inside the capitalist maw. A friend once remarked to me that the ethics of eating are so complicated that she wishes that, short of the government mandating that we eat all our meals in Supreme Court-certified-as-ethical cafeterias, we could just universally forgive each other for not getting it right. So too when it comes to living in the world as women. If we were born one kind of element, honest and true, then our repeated interactions with the world—with our mothers, with magazines—have by now totally transformed us into an altogether different thing, totally rearranged at a chemical level, possibly radioactive. It is challenging to say what is mine and what is not and where that difference is still meaningful. (The problem calls to mind Lorelai Gilmore’s realization in Gilmore Girls that she is not sure if she likes Pop-Tarts or if she likes annoying her parents, who would never eat Pop-Tarts.) That we want something—drugs, male attention—does not mean its fulfillment will do us good, nor does it mean that we don’t, indeed, want it. “As if wanting something makes it hurt less,” says the protagonist of Patricia Lockwood’s novel No One is Talking About This. Febos, whose author photo was for many years one of her in a t-shirt printed with a phrase from Jenny Holzer, Protect Me from What I Want, told The Coveteur:

There’s this lifelong tension that I’ve experienced between what I know to be true, which is that women in this country are subjected to a beauty standard that is impossible for most bodies to meet, and that impossibility is actually the point because it’s used to manipulate us to buy things and to hate ourselves and to be docile bodies in a system that exploits us; at the same time, I spend a lot of money at Sephora. And there’s a lot of pleasure in that . . . At this point, I feel like I recognize that those habits are older than any other habits that I have; they are so deeply ingrained in me. And I can find routes of expressing them that are less harmful or also have good consequences. I can indulge in beauty with my queer community, with folks who are not fetishizing whiteness. I can find routes where I’m also nourishing myself and nourishing other people. I want to try to align those instincts with other practices that build community and are maybe radical in some ways.

The ethics of Body Work are not necessarily that we writers and lovers must achieve perfect consistency between our behaviors (shopping at Sephora) and our politics (beauty standards are harmful), or between our desires (to be rewarded, both intangibly and commercially, for our adherence to dominant culture) and our values (to resist that dominance). Rather, it’s that we ought to write from a self-aware intention of teaching ourselves “to tell the difference,” as Febos puts it, between our “internal scripts” and the ideas specific to us, as creative individuals. In a chapter about confession, Febos describes the ideas of the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who saw repentance as beginning with the desire to change. Similarly, Febos suggests, a desire to change must precede good writing, and, importantly, that this is all that must precede it. “All that has been required of me to write something,” she writes, “is this change of heart.”  For example, the origin of Abandon Me was an almost-unconscious decision, made one tearful night, that she would ultimately leave the source of her tears.

Still, the actual writing of that relationship came a year later, after Febos had indeed broken up with her girlfriend and freed herself to write about her. Before then, “I did not have access to a narrative except the one my lover and I colluded in,” Febos writes. When she did revisit that relationship as a single woman, Febos discovered not just that she had been “in a kind of bondage” to her ex, but that “I had collaborated with her in this project.” She continues, “it was only in locating this complicity that I could write a story worth reading.” Fair enough; after all, the title of this book includes the word “work.”

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There is a significant caveat, though, to this idea that Febos is teaching us not how to write, but how to be. As Febos points out, women writers who write about their experience of being women are asked by their interviewers not about the writing, but about those experiences themselves—as if the writer had not already carefully said what she wanted to say on that subject in the book. “At readings,” Febos writes, “I would be billed on posters as MELISSA FEBOS, FORMER DOMINATRIX, alongside my co-reader, [INSERT MALE WRITER NAME], POET.” It seems to me, as a frequent reader of interviews with women writers, that women who write books, especially memoirists, are often called into a parasocial relationship with their readers, required to share with their audience not just carefully constructed narratives in book format but carefully constructed narratives of lives as “cool” women, too—whom they date, what clothing brands they like, what makeup they buy.

In a writing class I took with Febos in the fall of 2021, I was no doubt thinking of those same writers when, in response to her question about our wildest writerly fantasy, I said that I wanted to be celebrated enough to be interviewed about things that weren’t writing, like what lotions I use (IntotheGloss), or what I eat (Grub Street) or what’s in my nightstand drawer (Cosmo). I wanted people to fall so in love with my writing that they would desire to know and love my body—where it vacationed, how often it worked out. I don’t remember what Febos said in resposne, but what her book says to me now—and it is worth pointing out that there is very little in Body Work about Febos as a lover, as a consumer, as a body—is, “Be gentle with yourself, but, please, do ask: Why do you want what you want? How can you seek better for yourself and, for others? Maybe, indeed, for a daughter?”