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Top of the pile
83
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
78/100Critics
81/100Scholars
90/100Author:
Melissa Febos
Publisher:
Catapult
Date:
March 15, 2022
Melissa Febos tackles the emotional, psychological, and physical work of writing intimately while offering an examination of the storyteller's life and the questions which run through it.
What The Reviewers Say
... an explanation of why stories like Febos’s are powerful, and moreover, why they take so much work. In their attempts to write in the confessional form, my students inevitably encounter dilemmas—including struggles over sentence sequencing and the fear of problematic ex-boyfriends reading their work—that Febos wants to help resolve.
In her new book, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, memoirist Melissa Febos handily recuperates the art of writing the self from some of the most common biases against it: that the memoir is a lesser form than the novel. That trauma narratives should somehow be over—we’ve had our fill.
Although the essays in what is arguably [Febos'] latest act of service to that questionable project are all personal narratives themselves (as opposed to straight-up craft essays with clear dos and don'ts for the aspiring or practicing writer), they also provide practical and philosophical arguments for the expansiveness that such narratives allow and for their power in the world.
A lazy categorization would describe Body Work as 'part memoir, part craft book, part literary treatise.' But Febos’s work defies this kind of segmentation. Each of her books contains multitudes, seamlessly coalesced into a single truth-seeking missile. Her trademark magic is in the melding.
