I'm reading Abandon Me by Melissa Febos. Once I finish, I will have read all her books. I think I read them back to back all in a row: Body Work, Whip Smart, Girlhood, and Abandon Me. No, that's not true. I read Bad Sex after Body Work. Give me memoirs lately about love, relationships, sex.
I've never read straight through an author's catalogue before, although I've liked the idea. (I think I could have with Tana French, but it would have ruined my life for that span of time. I would have gotten nothing done for months.) Febos' mind seems to work like mine. (I flatter myself.) She loops back and back on things. She's obsessed with relationships, with love, with trauma, with herself. She's a secretive person who wants to be known. In Abandon Me, she talks about feeling like a wild animal in her desires. I relate. She wants love the way I want love, bodily, from a wound, from strength.
Reading her makes me feel like I know myself better, from finding which words strike a chord in me and which do not. (For example, she's struggled with hating her body - disciplining it harshly - and I feel that I luckily have not.) When she talks about her experience with her beloved, she winds through essays about her parents and her brother. Of course. I feel all those things connected in me too. She seems exposed to the world and like she's overcome it. (Although, even from a place of success -- like being this good at writing and working for the Iowa writers workshop and being married -- who knows if she's really triumphant. She seems to be in a good place, though.)
Reading her makes me feel more accepting of myself. That my desire for love isn't shameful. That the way I struggle doesn't make me a pitiful thing. That you can write and write and expose yourself and come away understood. If not understood, maybe a little seen. That you can mend your story through the telling of it.
Lightning. Hot sauce.
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