This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month Body Work by Melissa Febos.
I read a lot of memoirs, essays, and other creative non-fiction. I read a lot about what it’s like to be a woman, queer, disabled, a survivor. I only identify as a couple of those things myself, but I’m drawn to reading the experiences of other people who describe themselves in those terms. The opening essay of
Body Work is about the internal and external struggle of writing a memoir when you are from a marginalized group, particularly if you also identify as a woman.
In telling her own experience of writing memoirs, Febos reassures marginalized writers that their stories are valuable and necessary. They are radical and transformative.
At its heart,
Body Work is a book about writing, about crafting your own story and putting it out in the world for others to read. In the other three essays of the book, we get the writing advice we need: how to write about sex without cringing; how to write about your family without alienating them; and how to exorcise your memories through the process of confessional writing.
At its heart, Body Work is a book about writing, about crafting your own story and putting it out in the world for others to read.
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It would be easy to overlook this book because you are not a writer or any other kind of artist. That would be a mistake.
When reading this book, I wasn’t considering how it would help me as a writer or a reader (though it does just that). I was thinking of my entire history of relationships, be they family, friend, or romantic partner. I thought of the times I felt self-righteous and the times I felt misunderstood. As humans, we craft a story about ourselves and our experiences, but we often fail to consider that those close to us craft the same story, with a different truth we don’t recognize.
It is not often that I reread a book so quickly after finishing it the first time. In visiting
Body Work a second time, I found myself turning away from the writing advice and more to the author’s treatise on the healing effects of confession and the power of confronting your own trauma.