I discovered Melissa Febos’ Girlhood the spring of my high school graduation year when it was gifted to a friend of mine by her teacher. It was the ending of one of the most tumultuous and transformative years of my life but also, for anyone of that age, generally a year of great change and learning. Melissa Febos had a lot to teach me. It was springtime in New England, where Febos grew up and the setting for much of her work, and my friend and I lay on her sun soaked bed taking turns reading the first few essays to each other. We gasped together over the splendid writing and the profound insights about what it means to inhabit the form of a young woman.
Girlhood chronicles Febos’ formative experiences and their effect on her choices and understanding of herself, whilst also teaching her readers in each carefully crafted sentence how to unlearn everything that is imparted on us as young women. This is not an uncommon message but Febos uses uncommon methods: her brutal honesty about her own complex experiences is paired with compelling research and reporting. Her writing is poetry in prose form and each essay has a theme and a storyline that seamlessly and consistently resonates.
The summer I found this book was so close to the precipice of my adulthood that I began to imitate it: I travelled alone with friends, spent weeks working and living at home without my parents, preparing quickly to move out and begin university. And for those blissful months suspended between childhood and real life, I carried this book with me everywhere, allowing it to impact me in whatever way it deemed fit. My female friends and I read it to each other on road trips, on plane rides, late at night, on the beach beneath the sun. We discussed how each word resonated with us personally, shed tears collectively and separately. I sent the essay “Thesmophoria” to my mother because it was the only way I could say the things that I hadn’t been able to for the entire year prior. My father wrote to me later that day to tell me how deeply it affected her and I felt relief in having healed something vital just in the nick of time. Febos’s words granted me and the women around me the understanding of things we had been through, both individual and societal, recent or long buried, and helped us prepare for what was ahead. I still have this book on my bedside table, its wisdom accessible and always necessary.
“beach reading II” by iolanda fresnillo is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0