Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart and the essay collections Abandon Me and Girlhood. She also has a craft book forthcoming from Catapult in 2022. Febos was the inaugural winner of the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary, and her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Sun, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Granta, The Believer, The New York Times, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Book Review, Lenny Letter, The Guardian, Elle, and Vogue. She curated the Mixer Reading and Music Series in Manhattan for ten years and served on the Board of Directors for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts for five. The recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, Febos is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program.

MF: How’s your book going?

EB: Oh, wow, thanks for asking. It’s okay. I’m in the process of revising the manuscript right now and it’s… really hard. Do you have any advice for how to edit things down? I always way over-write. My manuscript was supposed to be 70–80k words and my first draft was 115k.

MF: I have the same problem. I do think there are people with the opposite problem, where they have to do a stingy model first, that then they need to fill out. But all of my drafts always balloon into a totally unpublishable size. Same for my research—it expands into unmanageable amounts of time.

EB: Well, I feel a lot better knowing that The Great Melissa Febos does the same thing I do.

MF: I saw this meme that was a picture of Elton John in all these crazy boas, and he was labeled “the book proposal” and he was sitting next to this really boring-looking dude, who was labeled “the book.” For me it’s the opposite. It comes from the research—I’ll read this one article, and then I’ll read the bibliography for that, and then I will discover the work of this fucking scholar I’ve never heard of but now I clearly think we are soul mates and I have to read all of their work and then there always comes a moment where I’m completely overwhelmed.

EB: Yes. Exactly.

MF: And then I start thinking I need to go back to school to get another graduate degree in order to finish this one essay.

EB: [laughter] Same!

MF: This is why I need lots of people around me who can remind me that I do not have to get a PhD in Gender Studies in order to write about it. I’m not an expert in any one subject, but I’m an expert in how to combine a little of that with a little bit of this—to create something that’s different from any of my sources.

EB: That’s such a good point. Like I don’t need to be The Expert in everything I am writing about—it’s more that I am a tour guide, introducing the reader to all these different things I’ve found, introducing them to the real experts.

MF: I also have to do a lot of saying I’m saving quotes or articles for future projects, and then I can cut them from a draft. I have to do a lot of negotiating with myself. I tell myself that I will write something about this fantastically interesting-to-me thing someday, it’s just not this essay.

EB: Oh, yeah, I have whole Word documents full of quotes because cutting and pasting is less terrible to me than deleting. Even if I never open the Word document again, I feel better knowing it’s there. So much of writing is tricking yourself.

MF: It really is. I have so many tricks.

EB: So, we dove right into talking about nonfiction and research, but didn’t you start as a fiction writer? Was your MFA in fiction?

MF: It was. Well, until halfway through. My thesis was my first book.

EB: Got it.

MF: I was never drawn to writing nonfiction as a very young person. The great love of my reading life was fiction—novels—and it continues to be in many ways. When I was a younger reader, though, I didn’t differentiate between memoir and fiction—I just read books. I think my aversion to nonfiction had to do mostly with some internalized sexism. When I pictured a nonfiction writer, I saw some fucking dude journalist who chain-smoked and had really strong opinions that didn’t change.

EB: [laughter]

MF: So, it wasn’t until I was in grad school that I got curious about nonfiction. Though, because I was a coward, I took an undergrad nonfiction class. It was an introductory course—write a book review, write an op-ed—and then we got to memoir. And I realized I hadn’t even assimilated memoir into my bullshit idea of what a nonfiction writer was. Like I thought I had to read the whole New Yorker cover-to-cover every week to be a nonfiction writer. And I went home and did the homework, and, you know, when you have a subject that is ready to be written about, it just falls like low hanging fruit. I couldn’t stop writing once I started it. And my professor asked what I was working on and I said, “A very serious novel,” and he said, “Yeah, right. Not anymore. You’re writing a memoir.” And I said, “Definitely not, I’m definitely not writing memoir.” Meanwhile, I couldn’t stop writing the memoir.

And I stuck with it. I realized I enjoy writing nonfiction more than anything, because of the function it serves in my life. It makes me more honest—I have a greater loyalty to the truth in my nonfiction than I do in any other capacity in my life. I can be honest with myself in nonfiction to an extent that I do not achieve in any other way in my life. I think the artifice of fiction offers me too much protection. It’s a totally different kind of exercise for me. Nonfiction has always served a very immediate benefit to me far beyond the rewards of publishing—publishing is really kind of a footnote to what nonfiction does for me.

EB: I saw that you joked in the acknowledgments of Girlhood that you promise your family that one day you’ll go back to writing fiction, but do you actually think you’ll ever go back at this point?

MF: I don’t think I’ll ever really go back. I definitely won’t switch gears entirely. I do hope to write a novel, but writing fiction takes me so much longer and doesn’t feel as urgent.

EB: I’d love to hear more about your evolution as a nonfiction writer. I feel like your books have become more and more experimental. I would say Whip Smart was in a traditional memoir format/style with chronological narrative. Then Abandon Me was sub-titled as “memoirs” and was more lyrical and unusual, and then Girlhood I’ve seen described as an essay collection, a memoir, a general narrative nonfiction book—it kind of defies genre. Do you feel you had to start with the more straight-forward style and only could get more experimental later in your career? Or was that just how your writing style evolved?

MF: It was a very organic evolution. I learned how to tell a story when I wrote Whip Smart. Before I wrote that book, all my writing was really boring because I did not have an understanding of narrative tension. In many ways, the narrative of Whip Smart was a real gift because it was so straightforward. The story was limited by time, and I could tell it in a chronological way. Writing that book was an education in classic plot structure. The thing I love most is when the narrative tension in a book sweeps you away. Self-forgetting is the best gift of reading; all my favorite books are page-turning and weird and interesting and super lyrical. So, I think I’ve wanted to move toward that, but I had to figure out the basics first. I had to learn how to paint an apple before I could try abstraction.

EB: That makes a lot of sense.

MF: I love that I’ve published essays that editors called poems, published poems that editors called stories. I don’t really give a shit about genre. I feel like it is the work of critics to decide where a work belongs in terms of genre. That said, Girlhood is definitely an essay collection.

EB: [laughter] Whoops.

MF: I also think in some ways, and unintentionally, my books reflect the trends of the literary marketplace. I sold Whip Smart in 2008. If I had tried to sell an experimental lyric essay collection about being a dominatrix in 2008, I would have been laughed out of every meeting. In fact, I almost didn’t sell that book as it was because it was a much more conservative time. I mean, it’s always a more conservative time than we think it is, especially in publishing.

When I started writing Abandon Me, I met with this editor and described what I was working on, which, to her credit, does not describe very well. I was like, “It’s a collection of essays that are about me, my birth father, but also about multi-generational inheritance, but also about this really addictive, harrowing relationship, but also about my childhood, but also about…” She asked me what else I was working on. That was my answer. But then two to three years later, a lot of editors were interested in it.

EB: It’s funny, when I started my MFA in 2012, my professors all said it was impossible to sell an essay collection unless you were already established as a super famous New Yorker writer. And now nine years later, I see all these writers who have essay collections as their debut books! Though do you find a lot of writers get pushed into calling their books memoirs for marketing’s sake?

MF: Yeah, if possible, I think an editor will try to convince an author to call an essay collection a memoir. I had to fight for Abandon Me to be called “memoirs” and not “a memoir.” Which does feel like the most apt title for it, because it’s somewhere in between memoir and essays.

EB: Well, I’m all for it. My favorite types of nonfiction kind of defy genre and blend personal and literature and history and interviews with other people and all kinds of research. Which you do so well in all of your books, but especially Girlhood. What was the origin story of that book? How did it come about? Did you set out to write a bunch of essays around the theme girlhood or did it just happen?

MF: I didn’t start with a unifying theme. I looked at essays I had written recently and all the essays I wanted to write, and I realized that they all arrived at or departed from adolescent girlhood. It was somewhat surprising and disappointing at the time. I thought I had already written about all this in my other books! But I realized I had only given it a glancing treatment.

EB: I also love how different each essay is in the book.

MF: Every essay had to teach me how to write it. I’ve had to redefine my process with every book, which honestly makes me so tired right now. Some of the essays started off with just a word like in “The Mirror Test.” Some began more lyrically. Sometimes I started by looking at other texts or disciplines, or I would start with a belief or story about girlhood that I wanted to interrogate. And then I started reading stuff and started having conversations with other people.

EB: I really loved how you wove in interviews with other women throughout as well.

MF: The essay for me is really, in many ways, the transcript of my thinking process. Obviously, I then do a bunch of aesthetic work on it, but it always is a delineation of my thought process around a particular subject. And, because of that, a lot of the research worked itself into the essay in an explicit way. So, I was really surprised, especially by the investigative stuff like the interviews, how they ended up appearing in the essays, and that made me extremely anxious. Because I’m not a journalist. I don’t think of myself as a journalist. It was just an organic outgrowth of my process of thinking about these things. And that was definitely one of those times where I was like, “Sweetie, you know, I think I just have to apply to journalism school.” And my partner said, “Fair, but let me point out that you came to the same decision with the last essay you wrote, except it was a PhD.”

EB: Ha, my thing lately is wanting to go to school for library science because I feel like that would help me be a better researcher?

MF: One of the reasons why I wanted to become a writer was out of this really anxious, deep desire to study many different things. But I also kind of suspected that if I went to school for like, zoology, I probably wouldn’t finish because my interest wouldn’t last. But I did want to read a bunch of things about animals and, say, make an independent study of it for a year. Being a writer seemed the only way to be able to do that for my entire life, over and over.

EB: That’s so true. You get to research whatever you want, as long as you write about it, right? So, going back to research, and maybe you don’t have a good answer for this yet, but do you have any advice on how to keep track of your research? How do you keep it from getting unwieldy?

MF: Here’s what I’ve feared about so many things: there is an efficient, appropriate way to be doing the thing I’m doing, and I’m doing it wrong. And that’s why it’s hard. But I don’t think it’s actually true.

EB: That’s how I feel when I try to use Scrivener, like I must be doing it wrong.

MF: Yeah, there are a lot of good software out there, but I’m so visually and tactilely oriented so having an app is too abstract for me. I like to have a book to look at, I like to hang note cards up, I like to print things out and write on them. I also have a system of files and folders of Word documents. For every essay, I have a file for scraps that I cut, I have a file for quotes, I have a file for an outline. That’s as efficient as I can get. Even this morning, I had finished a big long draft and let it sit for a while. I’m ready to read it and then go into the next draft, and I tried to just read it in the document, and I can’t. It just doesn’t work for me. I just have to print it out in between draft.

EB: Oh, yeah, I’m all about printing stuff out to edit it. I’m constantly telling my students to print out their drafts, cut them up, and throw the pieces all over the floor. That’s my favorite.

MF: Every single time I do it I think, “This is an elaborate tool of procrastination.” But it always works. Something clicks! Because I have a spatial understanding of my own work—I can see where things are missing or where I’m going on too long. It’s the same thing like when I was trying to learn about pacing, and about the balance between scene and exposition in prose. I would take my favorite books or my favorite essays, and I would take two different colored highlighters and highlight all of the scenes in one color and of all the exposition in another to understand what that ratio looks like.

EB: That’s such a good idea! I’m going to start making my students do that.

MF: It helps a lot to see the physical of the back and forth.

EB: I have one more question about Girlhood—I wanted to ask about the illustrations. I actually went to grad school with Forsyth Harmon, and I love her work, and I was so excited to see her drawings on the pages of your book. How did your collaboration with Forsyth come about? And what do you think the illustrations add to the book?

MF: Forsyth came to the paperback launch of Abandon Me, introduced herself, and then we stayed in touch after that. She suggested collaborating, and I was working on the “Intrusions” essay, which I ended up publishing in Tin House, and I asked if Forsyth wanted to do the illustrations for it. Forsyth came up with these awesome illustrations, and it was so fun to work together that I asked if she wanted to do illustrations for the whole book. She agreed, and I asked my editor, fully expecting that she would say no, but she said, “Sure, sounds great.”

So, we worked our way through a few ideas and once she had read a full draft, Forsyth said, “I think this has to be like an illuminated manuscript.” The essays have so much going on and have really intricate image systems, and the images had to go with that. She used William Morris’s work as an inspiration, and the Arts and Crafts style of really elaborate borders. And I loved that because that type of work is so masculine—like you think of The Canterbury Tales or William Blake—and I liked the idea of bringing that visual gravity to the topic of girlhood.

Forsyth mostly came up with them but we went back and forth on them about specific elements, but I really loved the idea of looking at the image to get a sense of the essay, then reading the essay, and going back to the image and getting even more out of it. I can’t wait to get massive prints of them for my house. The little hyena one for the “Wild America” essay is my favorite.

EB: I loved that one too! I’m also super excited for Forsyth’s book.

MF: Me too! There is one drawing that is both in her book and my book, which I really like. It feels like our books our cousins.

EB: So, unless you’re collaborating with someone as awesome as Forsyth,writing can be a pretty solitary task. Who do you turn to for support? Who makes up your writing community?

MF: My partner is a writer. She’s a poet, and she’s definitely my first reader for most things. She is a really good reader and understands my work, and she has an academic background—a PhD in English—which comes in handy. She really appreciates the work that goes into things and, because she is a poet, she pays attention to the line.

And I have a little cohort of friends, most of whom I’ve been sharing work with for a long time. Many of my closest friends are writers, and even some of the ones that aren’t are great readers. One of my best readers is a friend who is an anthropologist. She is a very interesting systemic thinker. I think it is important to have different friends for different types of reads, and it’s helpful to know what I am looking for in a reader when I ask them to look at something. I also have a lot of people I can call to talk me off a ledge. I can call and say, “Hi, I think I need to get a PhD to finish this essay, tell me why I’m wrong.”

EB: That’s great. You’re so right—sometimes it really helps to have someone read your work who isn’t a writer at all but who just loves a good book.

MF: I agree. It’s really important to have other people who are not pretentious like writers are, because I’m not interested in my work being a writerly circle jerk.

EB: [laughter]

MF: But it is important to remember you can’t please everyone, and that after you publish there will always be people who will willfully misinterpret work, who just want to pick a fight with it. I’ve never written anything that isn’t followed up by some “expert” dude who wants to tell me what I’ve done wrong.

EB: Oh, yeah, I know that guy. He used to come to every event when I worked at Newtonville Books.

MF: Hate that guy.

EB: I don’t often get to interview a fellow Masshole, so I wanted to ask, how do you think being from Massachusetts affects your writing, if at all? I love the moment in Girlhood where you talk about going to look at the Atlantic when you feel overwhelmed by your problems because they feel insignificant and small in comparison to the ocean—I do that too.

MF: Of course being from Massachusetts affects my writing! Absolutely. Where you grow up affects how you understand the world, but also the physical geographic places shape your image system. The things you see growing up become symbols. I always have to do a read of an essay just to prune out all the fucking sea barnacles and nautical shit. But just, everything about how understand class, race, land/water, what the sky looks like—all of that is oriented from Massachusetts. I also will always be a sucker for any movie with lots of Boston accents in it.

EB: So, what do you find most rewarding about writing nonfiction? And what do you find most challenging?

MF: The most rewarding thing is easy—that writing nonfiction for me is a process of comprehending and finding value in my own experience, experiences that I have found to be the most confounding or painful. I don’t regret anything I’ve ever written, because it provides a kind of alchemy—both for me and in a public way. Writing about experience turns it into something that is valuable to other people: proof that there are witnesses to something, proof for people looking for a model of something, proof that we are not alone.

The hardest part is a toss-up. Part of it is the ways I am required to confront myself and the stories I’ve created about myself, the honesty I impose on myself. But also the process of combining the emotional and psychological process of writing nonfiction with aesthetic processes of it. I love it—I love the project of it—but it is so hard, to make it worth a stranger’s time in both aspects. It’s reinventing the wheel every single time. But because it’s so hard, that’s what keeps me interested. I’m a great quitter of things. I find it hard to keep doing things that don’t feel challenging and engaging, and writing is the only thing I’ve done forever because it is so hard. It doesn’t get old.

EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow “non-man” writer?

MF: I’m going to go with Audre Lorde, from her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”: “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.”

EB: Thank you for talking with me, Melissa! This has made me feel so much better about my own writing process.

MF: Any time you are struggling, remind yourself it is always supposed to be that hard.