... ambitious.

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.

... psychologically complex and lyrical.

I wish I could have read Girlhood when I was young. While I am decades past the era investigated by essayist Melissa Febos, her third memoir resonated with my own fraught emergence under surveillance and scrutiny.

... takes the task of looking backward seriously.

With psychological clarity and emotional precision, Febos revisits the past to rewrite the future.

Never before have I read an essay collection that captures exactly the feeling of a sleepover with my best friend, whispering to each other in the dark.

The eight essays within, haunted by images of scraping, scarring, and binding, explore the archaic traces our bodies bear from the patriarchal culture that shapes us from birth.

In attempting to trace these conflicting narratives — and their lasting effects — in her own life, Febos has written here a work that is both an exposé and a corrective, a memoir and a polemic...she once again turns her keen intellect and unflinching honesty toward myriad personal stories that have wider implications for girls’ and women’s narratives. Neither self-indulgent nor guilty of navel-gazing, Febos writes about herself always in the service of her larger project: to dissect the long-term ramifications of the societal narratives forced upon girls and women.

Febos layers research from historical, literary, and cultural texts within her personal narratives––a technique familiar to readers of her other books––to deepen and enrich Girlhood’s ambitious aims to define the creation of gender within the patriarchy.

My reaction to the trope of the girl-dreamer might have to do with a tendency that I’m loath to recognize in myself: the assumption people make, based on the fact that they maintain an active fantasy life, that others don’t experience the world as intensely as they do.

The overall impression she creates is a collage of discomfitingly familiar rites of passage, all distinct and yet all tied together by a thread of learned self-abnegation. The book reads at moments like a meme built from various half-buried abuses and indignities, in which you pick the ones that apply to you.

These are the kind of familiar scenes so many of us try to forget, or at least avoid talking about with each other, for a lifetime. And Febos has a calibrated attention for the texture of those experiences, their particular flavor of shame and mild (or not) horror.

Through lush, pleasurably painful essays...she’s written a memoir that, written like a retrospective, function as an anti coming-of-age story. It’s a raw, intimate elegy for an innocence that was never hers to begin with and a recovery of the self, both divine and corporeal..

Febos writes freely and boldly, narrating seemingly unpleasant, disturbing and intrepid experiences of a young girl. Yet, her writing is candid and sincere as she juxtaposes her thoughts with her actions.

Girlhood paints a disturbing if familiar portrait of female adolescence.

Eight essays that are a phenomenal, beautiful mix of investigation and lyricism to delve into the trauma and wonders of being a woman. The continuation of threads from her earlier books is extraordinary, not only in terms of craft, but because it shows the complexity of life, how one event or relationship can influence others, and how the unrelenting grip of the patriarchy affects us all.

Febos is a dab hand at the memoir genre.

[G]irlhood will not only speak to you, it will also ignite fury that two words like 'ordinary' and 'violation' should ever have cause to couple. A capacious blend of memoir and reportage, history and cultural criticism, its seven essays loosely chart Febos’s journey from girlhood to womanhood.

... long, artistic, and art-informed essays that are rich with references.

The prose is restrained but lyrical throughout. Raw and unflinching, this dark coming-of-age story impresses at every turn..

An acclaimed nonfiction writer gathers essays embracing the pleasure, pain, and power of growing up as a girl and woman.