Bringing a Collective Experience to Light: A Review of Melissa Febos's Girlhood

Melissa Febos opens her new essay collection, Girlhood, with a collage of visceral images of pain inflicted on the body—bloody knees, burned arms, skin rubbed raw. The opening essay is a lyric barrage of beautiful language and poetic image. In the essays that follow she looks back through a scrutinizing lens on her adolescence. Our very grown-up narrator takes us through the years she spent swimming in the ponds of Cape Cod, through most of her early sexual experiences, and into her late teens and twenties working as a Dominatrix in New York City. Using lyrical language and a meandering structure to move through her memories and experiences, the book also contains illustrations by Forsyth Harmon that highlight some of the most beautiful lines in the book.

Many of the places and scenes will be familiar for those who read her first book, Whip Smart, a memoir about being a dominatrix in New York City, and her essay collection, Abandon Me, about her father, her biological father, and a love affair gone wrong. But Ferbos’s voice and authority feel very different in this work. While the outside research and frequent metaphor were a large part of her second book Abandon Me—Girlhood moves from memoir to theory, and back again, with a new voice of authority. 

Febos sets up the problem that she investigates in this collection, the conditioning of a patriarchal society, and really defines it for the reader in her opening Author’s Note:

“This training of our minds can lead to the exile of many parts of the self, to hatred and the abuse of our own bodies, the policing of other girls, and a lifetime of allegiance to values that do not prioritize our safety, happiness, freedom, or pleasure.”

I read this quote with intrigue, but did not feel this until I was well into her second essay, “Kettle Holes,” where our early-to-develop narrator is expelled from female social circles and sexualized and bullied by young boys. A rush of middle school memories returned to me. Friends whose names appeared on the bathroom stall with “slut” written over it in black sharpie markers, lying about periods and tampons and getting to third base, either because we wanted to give people the impression that we had, or because we wanted to give people the impression that we hadn’t.

She builds on this girlhood narrative in the third essay in the book, “The Mirror Test,” taking the reader on a graceful weave of early sexual exploration—safely on her own—and the harrowing experience of her external sexual experiences. Is it painful to read? At times, yes, but in the sense that she is bringing a collective girlhood experience to light, it feels freeing to see that pain and discomfort that is so rarely addressed put down on the page. Febos takes her time to explain that her experiences were not particularly unusual, she was not raped nor did she experience a specific isolated incident of trauma, but instead, she portrays through her narrative a system of patriarchy that young woman endure which is normal, everyday, and troubling.

My best friend and I, both straight white Midwestern women, spent much of our twenties attempting to unpack our early relationships and sexual experiences as newly college educated grown-ups. Why were we so insecure? Why didn’t we trust men to treat us well? Why did we fear other women—who might see us as a threat, who might be jealous or callous toward us? Where had all of this come from? This questioning and investigation is just the work Febos is doing in Girlhood. Our thoughtful narrator is pulling apart the threads of these early experiences and giving us a context for understanding them. Much of the book is woven narrative, careful to never leave us too long in those dark moments. She regularly moves into a mode of what I can only really explain as autotheory.

Arianne Zwartjes explains in her essay, “Autotheory as Rebellion” (Michigan Quarterly Review) how mixing theory with personal narrative has power: “In one way, autotheory is the chimera of research and imagination. It brings together autobiography with theory and a focus on situating oneself inside a larger world, and it melds these different ways of thinking in creative, unexpected ways.” While Febos is working her way through her girlhood experiences, she is also reaching out to other woman, seeking their stories. She pulls these characters into her own story and brings their voices to the page. She tells us about psychological research and anecdotal research and in doing so paints a much more layered experience than her story alone could accomplish. She doesn’t stop there. She also examines literature and movies to highlight the experiences we see and read about in the media—arguably forming our ideas and beliefs as much as our own experiences. (Her critique of the movie Easy A, a teen comedy from 2010, was easily my favorite.) This analysis from our patient, if not urgent, adult narrator is leading slowly toward her goal—an understanding of what happened to her and what it means.

In her Author’s Note, Febos explains another hurdle for the content of these essays—“For years, I considered it impossible to undo much of this indoctrination.” This struggle becomes more evident as the book progresses. The narrator becomes a young adult, who struggles with addiction and works as a dominatrix. She engages in relationships with women and men, some of them pretty dysfunctional. She does not give us easy answers, because she doesn’t have any. Her process of investigation, much like her other two books, makes her writing compulsively readable—we want to find out what she finds out. And in so many ways, for me, the reading experience is personal. Her lived experience as a young woman in America was too familiar. I didn’t have a stalker in my early twenties, but I knew other women who did. I didn’t feel forced to give a boy a hand-job when I was twelve, but I did for many years after. Even where her experiences were outside my own, they were achingly close to the darkest parts of the stories that shaped my understanding of sex and relationships growing up.  

The adult Febos introduces us to her fiancé Donika, who acts as a bit of foil to our narrator. She questions the normalcy of the early experiences and pushes more investigation into her past. She offers an alternative way of looking at the “events” as Febos decides to call them, that live in her memories. The investigation seems to come to a head in the penultimate essay, “Thank You for Taking Care of Yourself” when Febos and Donika, along with a friend, go to a “cuddle party.” The seventy-six page essay traverses many topics, but the cuddle party drags us into the uncomfortable experience (at least for some) of physically being close to strangers—proof that Febos didn’t just mentally push herself to understand the lasting effect of her girlhood experiences, but physically tried to find situations that would help her undo them as well. As I read through some of the cringe-worthy experiences, I could help but think, Oh wow, my therapist would be proud of her! And perhaps this is part of the gift of this collection, she is doing a lot of emotional work, that many of us haven’t had the time or energy to do. It is the cuddle party that leads to Febos’s brilliant exposition on “empty consent”—a term that says so much. Febos explains:

“I see two powerful imperatives that collaborate to encourage empty consent: the need to protect our bodies from the violent retaliation of men and the need to protect the same men from the consequences of their own behavior, usually by assuming personal responsibility. It is our shame, our embarrassment, our duty alone to bear it.”

Giving a name to the expression of “yes” when what you really mean is: “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure” or “I want to say no but I don’t want to hurt your feelings or make you angry” was an especially powerful moment in her investigation.

Febos’s narratives continuously circle back to her youth. She raises the stories that dotted her girlhood over and over again. This continuous re-visiting mirrors our own memory, how they can pop up again and again, and allows her to reframe the narratives in new ways as she moves towards understanding. There are many moments that shine in Febos’s often lyric language and vivid imagery, but one that stuck out for me was in “The Mirror Test.” The narrator has gone to a liberal hippy summer camp, and she finds the camp director is a tattooed young woman, beautiful in overalls and a shaved head. She says of meeting her, “When she looked down at me, though I was terrified, I felt more seen than I’d ever felt under another person’s gaze.” Seeing an empowered woman through Febos’s eyes was a striking moment in her story. While Febos cannot literally go back in time to comfort her young self, she seems to have found a way to offer comfort, and a way forward, for her younger self, and for all the rest of us who lived through those troubling and isolating girlhood years. 

A Review of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi

Piranesi, the title character of Susanna Clarke’s new novel, has appointed himself explorer and archivist of his world—an apparently endless labyrinth of stone halls lined with enigmatic statues. A vigorous sea sweeps through the lower level of the house; cloud, mist, and rain roam the upper level; stars shine through the windows at night. As far as Piranesi knows, he is the only living inhabitant of his world but for one: the Other, an academic who believes that the House holds a forgotten knowledge which can be used to unlock powers of flight, shape-shifting, and telepathy long lost to humankind.

Like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Clarke’s 2004 bestseller, Piranesi is a novel of enchanting world-building and detail, and a novel that is itself enchanted by the pursuits of knowledge-seeking and knowledge-sharing. Jonathan Strange layered speculative elements over a realist framework of Georgian social dynamics, emphasizing power relations and socially enforced silences. In Piranesi, Clarke has focused on a setting that reconfigures aspects of human experience and the natural world into abstract forms; a setting that recalls the parallel world on the other side of the rain to which the magicians of Jonathan Strange disappear.

Jonathan Strange is heavily footnoted, so that the novel itself could seem to be one of the volumes of magical history to which the narrator refers. Piranesi, too, is conceived as a found object, as if it has grown freely out of its own setting. The novel is structured as a series of journal entries, leaving the reader reliant upon Piranesi’s observations as a window into his world. Luckily, Piranesi is a generous observer and a meticulous notetaker: “As a scientist and an explorer,” he tells us, “I have a duty to bear witness to the Splendours of the World.” Clarke narrates so brilliantly through Piranesi as to turn his keen eye for detail and tendency toward pompousness into stylistic flourishes.

Piranesi’s frequent interrogatives make the text rich with a kind of loneliness more akin to wonder than to moodiness. “When I feel myself about to die, ought I to go and lie down with the People of the Alcove?” he writes, referring to a set of skeletons that he has discovered in the House, and to which he—like an acolyte—administers offerings of food, drink, and flowers. “What is a few days of feeling cold compared to a new albatross in the World?” he writes, as he sacrifices the dried seaweed that he burns to keep warm for a family of albatrosses that has made its home in his Halls. Piranesi’s narration is fascinated by the interconnectedness of things, and by Piranesi’s own place in the web of being that includes skeleton, albatross, statue, and sea.

The pages of the novel are studded with clever details and found objects, and part of the delight of wandering Piranesi’s Halls is in finding and listening to them. Listening to them because—though Piranesi is a distinctly quiet novel, punctuated by terse conversations between characters who tend to conceal as much as they share—every object that we discover in its pages is gorgeously in conversation with Piranesi’s universe. There are the pieces of torn-up notes found stashed in birds’ nests—evidence of a human mind in distress. There are the bottles of multivitamins and slices of Christmas cake that the Other occasionally offers to Piranesi, which suggest the existence of a world external to the House. There are the “seashells, coral beads, pearls, tiny pebbles and interesting fishbones” that Piranesi weaves into his own hair, physical manifestations his oneness with the House, which other characters would likely call his madness.

Piranesi is a thriller at times, with moments of fast-paced action and occult intrigue—but it is the interaction between Piranesi and his setting that makes the novel illuminating and memorable. Like one of Borges’ labyrinths, Clarke’s infinite house of statues is a meeting point between human consciousness and indifferent cosmos; between meaning-making and wild-beyond-meaning. As Piranesi and the Other navigate this liminal space, Clarke shows us different ways of thinking about knowledge and the natural world.

Piranesi identifies himself as an explorer and a scientist, but also as the “Beloved Child of the House”—because Piranesi’s way of knowing is also a way of loving, a way of receiving love. Piranesi’s ways of knowing are numerous: he explores the Halls by foot and notes the statues he encounters; he records patterns of star and sea, and so makes sense of the terrible tides; he talks to, and receives messages from, birds and statues. Clarke uses Piranesi as a model of knowing, and reminds us that there are areas of overlap between knowing and loving: Both ways of relating to the world can involve attentiveness and wonder.

Piranesi soon comes into conflict with the Other over the latter’s search for exploitable knowledge. Piranesi worries that this model of knowledge-seeking leads the seeker “to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted.” This objection to the Other’s motivations is not a denunciation of scientific pursuit (Piranesi, after all, is an avid mapper of stars and predictor of tides); instead, it is an intellectual cringing-away from the kind of science that views the universe as dumb stuff. To Piranesi, the universe is active—infinite in its beauty and kindness—and the worthwhile ways of knowing the universe are those which put him into greater harmony with it.

One of the few missed opportunities in Piranesi is the novel’s failure to locate its literary discussion of “madness” in relation to contemporary discourse about mental health or cognition. Clarke’s romantic treatment of madness (which is related to both childhood cognition and melancholy, and which opens the mind to magic) feels at home in the Georgian context of Jonathan Strange. It seems disappointing, though, that Clarke’s treatment of madness has not evolved in Piranesi: Though several characters are contemporary academics, discussions of Piranesi’s state of mind are conducted in the same, general, poetical terms as in Jonathan Strange.

Piranesi’s prolonged stay in the House, we learn, has caused him to suffer from memory loss and other side-effects. Piranesi, however, does not sense any disconnect between his consciousness and the totality of things. “The World feels Complete and Whole, and I, its Child, fit into it seamlessly,” he writes. “Nowhere is there any disjuncture where I ought to remember something but do not, where I ought to understand something but do not.” Piranesi’s state of mind (his memory loss, his dissociation from his former identity, his familial feelings toward birds and statues), which other characters call madness, seems to go hand-in-hand with his ability to understand the House.

Madness figures into Piranesi as a literary device, as it does in Jonathan Strange or the Romances of Chretien de Troyes. Given the cleverness with which the novel resolves some of the other puzzles of relation between the normal, human world and the House, it seems a shame that Clarke has not weighed in more explicitly regarding the extent to which Piranesi’s cognitive state might connect to something literal.

There are also moments of awkwardness toward the end of the novel, when the action between characters becomes the central focus of the narrative, and Piranesi’s relationship with the House seems to take a backseat. The narrative’s sudden insistence on straightening out Piranesi’s literal circumstances (on the Resolution of the Plot, as Piranesi might write) feels a rude awakening after we have been so happily immersed in the mysteries of the House, which ought to evade resolution.

Piranesi is a shapeshifting, dynamic creation that keeps the reader guessing as to what kind of thing, exactly, it is. It is a book about magic and alternate worlds, and also a book about science and learning. At the core of the novel is an abstract conflict that transcends human action; yet the pages are too saturated with Piranesi’s emotive consciousness to read as a straightforward, disinterested allegory. Gorgeously imagined and meticulously constructed, generous and sharp, it is one of those rare books that cuts through the heart of things but leaves that heart beating.

He Is In Every Sense An Awful Man But He's Also Sympathetic

Michael Kimball’s Big Ray is the kind of book that will occupy your complete attention for at least fifteen minutes after Molly Gaudry hands you a copy to look through in her living room. You’ll be drinking tea and eating tea cookies, but you’ll have to stop drinking the tea so that you can turn the pages. You’ll keep eating the tea cookies, which you’ll shovel into your mouth faster and faster as you follow Kimball’s narrator’s brief flashes of sequential memory farther down their self-amending rabbit hole. You’ll be so into it, that you’ll be a little peeved when Molly takes the book away.

What’s immediately impressive about Big Ray is that it works exactly the way that memory works, at least some of the time. Daniel Todd Carrier’s father has, by the time the novel begins, died for some reason. His death could be attributed to any number of reasons, but those are hardly important. This isn’t a murder mystery or a medical exposé. This is a human novel about how a human son remembers his human father, who has recently become very humanly dead.

Kimball’s narrative unfolds through some of the most authentic, most honest prose that I’ve come across. When I was reading Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, someone told me that he wrote a chapter a day. It made sense; this method explained how he never got long-winded, how one chapter broke so naturally into the next. Despite the impossibly apocalyptic Ice-Nine and the off-the-wall Bokononisms it seemed honest, even confessional. Kimball’s bite-sized chapter sections, the longest of which are two and three paragraphs, do a great deal to make Big Ray feel at least as immediate, at least as “true.”

The titular Big Ray is a big, disgusting, abusive, dead man. His presence looms larger than his 500-pound frame in this book, and it’s easy to write him off as a caricature at first glance, but it’s hard not to sympathize with him. We see him as a boy, as a high school student that looks like James Dean, and as a Private First Class in the Marines, but never as someone who sets out to do the wrong thing. He is in every sense an awful man but he’s also sympathetic, and he’s a figure who you’ll find yourself wanting to know by the time you’re through the first few chapters.

Our POV character is a grieving son, who is equally intriguing. He leads us through memories of the immediate fallout of his father having been found dead in his apartment, and alternates this narrative with one constructed of childhood memories. All of these are presented from the perspective of an adult mind rationalizing these experiences little-by-little.

Toward the middle of the novel, Daniel Todd Carrier has been relating his history of abuse at the impossibly fast hand of his father Big Ray, when he offers this tiny, reflective interruption: “Sometimes, I still get the urge to fight my father. If my father weren’t dead, I would kick his ass.” This kind of evaluation is tempered with flashes of memory that express another kind of sentiment entirely: “Sometimes, in the mornings before school, my father would look at the way I was dressed and say, ‘Looking sharp.’ That always made me feel really good.”

Big Ray is a novel full of terrifyingly dry wit, disgusting medical problems, beautiful sympathy, and honest-to-god people. It’s a page-turner in the best sense of the phrase, and you’ll have a damn good time reading it.

If You Take the 'e' Out of Dead, You Get Dad: A Review of Michael Kimball's Big Ray

In some ways, Michael Kimball’s Big Ray felt like I was reading from a dirge, a long melancholy hymn fractured into broken pieces, unified by Kimball’s troubled melody. There were too many parallels I identified with, too many details I understood too well to read this without a conflicted sense of empathy. Kimball bares all through his narrator, Daniel Todd Carrier, who recounts the life of his father, the eponymous Big Ray.

The book starts with the death of his father and while outwardly, it’s a biography revealing strips from Big Ray’s life, it evolves into an autopsy of their relationship, a dissection of sundered identity. Anecdotes, vignettes, and observations give us glimpses of who Big Ray is, though it reads less like a novel and more like a candid conversation with a good friend over drinks. In fact, the prose is so natural and free-flowing, it almost vanishes into the backdrop. Physical traits become character sketches as in the case of his father who is “morbidly obese” and suffers sleep apnea.

The snoring it caused was turbulent, violent, and full of animal sounds. The snoring was also part of why my mother divorced my father. She couldn’t get any good sleep either. Plus, my father took up most of the bed. There was just enough room for my mother to lie there and not move.

That paralysis his mother suffers becomes emblematic of their relationship that eventually leads to its fissure.

Daniel tries to find a map to navigate his father’s life, but contradictions abound, from his early military career that was mostly non-existent, to the quirky, almost accidental way his parents met (yelling at each other on the street). His father gambles, argues with his mom about everything, and scoops up all the leftover food at the dinner table. I was always waiting for a moral climax, the moment where the son would gain some insight into his father that would help the two bond. It was refreshingly authentic, then, that so much was left unresolved. The dysfunctional family never finds itself and there’s a morbid beauty in their disastrous interactions which is part of the allure of Big Ray.

The narrative jumps from the present to the past, but the transitions aren’t jarring and are handled as branching conversations that segue into different areas including a whole lot of fat jokes. Like most people, Big Ray is full of dichotomies that the narrator struggles with. Daniel seeks answers, not just for the sake of resolution, but his curiosity too. For example, his father has an argument with his mother because she sets out slices of bread rather than dinner rolls. It seems extremely petty until we’re told:

For my father, good bread was an important distinction between the poor farm family he grew up in and the middle-class family he expected us to be. That is why we had family dinners on Sunday. That is why we ate so many pot roasts.

The grossest memory of his father was when he’d make breakfast and he’d “stand over a frying pan wearing nothing but tight, stretchy, red bikini briefs. His underwear was always too small for him, so the crack of his butt stuck out above the waistband. . . He liked his eggs greasy and over easy. He fried his bacon until it was burnt. . . Even today, the smell of greasy eggs still makes me feel queasy.” The father makes for a ridiculous figure in the tight briefs, but he’s intent on cooking his bacon to crisp because that happens to be the way he likes it. The son endures the oily mornings because he has no choice, although he resists his father’s will by leaving before finishing the breakfast. Scenes like this form a thematic link throughout illustrating their conflict and hint at the bigger issues rotting their connection.

I went through a stage where I would walk into whatever room my father was in and turn the lights off. I never told anybody why, but I was trying to make him disappear.

Daniel is still turning off the lights paragraph by paragraph. Part of his anger comes from the abuse, both physical and mental, that is inflicted by his father on both him and his sister. It’s uncomfortable to read and there’s a final revelation near the end that left me feeling both depressed and ill. To the book’s credit, the scene is handled with brutal honesty but never feels like exploitation or a pity-seeking confessional.

It’s a gutsy truth to share with strangers (us the readers) and I know it’s a delicate balance to render this painful experience without coming across as sensational. I felt like Daniel was performing a mental baptism to exorcise that past trauma through this recounting and the loose structure of the book becomes more poignant as we realize it’s his attempt at finding answers in the nuances and details that comprise the jumbled mass of his memories.

In the end, there’s an interesting cycle revolving around weight that weaves an organic analogy for the cycle of the book. When Big Ray was born, he was six pounds. He ballooned up to 500 pounds, which “is also the size of the largest kind of lion, a full-grown male.” But as Daniel notes after his father is cremated, “My dad’s ashes weighed just over six pounds, which means he lost around 500 pounds after he died.” His dad went right back to where he started, and there’s an ambivalence and yearning that haunts the book from beginning to end originating from that lack of resolution. “If you take the e out of dead, you get dad.” Likewise, strip out the ‘Big’ from Big Ray, and all you have left is Ray.