Melissa Febos's Books

Abandon Me

Memoirs

By: Melissa Febos

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Named One of the Best Books of the year by: Esquire, Refinery29, BookRiot, Medium, Electric Literature, The Brooklyn Rail, Largehearted Boy, The Coil and The Cut. Winner of the Lambda Literary Jeanne Cordova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction Finalist, Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography Finalist, Publishing Triangle's Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction An Indie Next Pick A fierce and dazzling personal narrative that explores the many ways identity and art are shaped by love and loss. In her critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart, Melissa Febos laid bare the intimate world of the professional dominatrix, turning an honest examination of her life into a lyrical study of power, desire, and fulfillment. In her dazzling Abandon Me, Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection -- with family, lovers, and oneself. First, her birth father, who left her with only an inheritance of addiction and Native American blood, its meaning a mystery. As Febos tentatively reconnects, she sees how both these lineages manifest in her own life, marked by compulsion and an instinct for self-erasure. Meanwhile, she remains closely tied to the sea captain who raised her, his parenting ardent but intermittent as his work took him away for months at a time. Woven throughout is the hypnotic story of an all-consuming, long-distance love affair with a woman, marked equally by worship and withdrawal. In visceral, erotic prose, Febos captures their mutual abandonment to passion and obsession -- and the terror and exhilaration of losing herself in another. At once a fearlessly vulnerable memoir and an incisive investigation of art, love, and identity, Abandon Me draws on childhood stories, religion, psychology, mythology, popular culture, and the intimacies of one writer's life to reveal intellectual and emotional truths that feel startlingly universal.

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Page Count

337

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

1632866595

ISBN 13

9781632866592

Abandon Me

Memoirs

By: Melissa Febos

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Abandon Me

Memoirs

By: Melissa Febos

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

337

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

1632866595

ISBN 13

9781632866592

Shame on You

How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification

By: Melissa Petro

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Shame on You

How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification

By: Melissa Petro

In the spirit of Rebecca Traister's Good and Mad and Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist comes a courageous, in-depth investigation into the modern epidemic of shame in our society—what it is, why women are uniquely susceptible, and how we can shift the shame off our plates and live our best lives in an over-exposed, image-obsessed world. For millions of women, shame is a vicious predator. It tells us we are less than, that we are unworthy. We try everything to escape shame—ignoring it, intellectualizing it, and even, ironically, shaming ourselves for feeling it. The reality is that women experience shame more frequently and more intensely than men—a direct result, as acclaimed journalist Melissa Petro explains, of a patriarchal culture that “urges women to feel bad about themselves, and then punishes them when they do.” Why can’t we figure out how to break the shame cycle once and for all? In Shame on You, Petro takes on the issue of women’s shame directly with an unflinching look at the social systems that encourage women to believe we are deeply inadequate. From shame’s beginnings ( Maybe she’s born with it? Nope, it’s misogyny.) to its effect on our lives as adults (How the humiliation of “bad women” affects us all.), shame poisons our friendships, romantic relationships, and work lives. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Blending investigative reporting, science, literature, and hundreds of women’s personal stories—including her own shameful account of winding up as an unwitting New York Post cover girl—Petro offers us a new way forward. No matter what you do, she explains, there is no escaping being judged. And yet, the women we can become—sometimes as a consequence of shame, rather than in spite of it—are powerful indeed. And maybe that’s what others are afraid of.

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Page Count

289

Publisher

Penguin

Published Date

ISBN 10

0593714997

ISBN 13

9780593714997

A Tiny Upward Shove

A Novel

By: Melissa Chadburn

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A Tiny Upward Shove

A Novel

By: Melissa Chadburn

“Wild and ambitious . . . [with] something ablaze at its core. It burns.” —The New York Times Book Review A Tiny Upward Shove is inspired by Melissa Chadburn's Filipino heritage and its folklore, as it traces the too-short life of a young, cast-off woman transformed by death into an agent of justice—or mercy. Marina Salles’s life does not end the day she wakes up dead. Instead, in the course of a moment, she is transformed into the stuff of myth, the stuff of her grandmother’s old Filipino stories—an aswang, a creature of mystery and vengeance. She spent her time on earth on the margins; shot like a pinball through a childhood of loss, she was a veteran of Child Protective Services and a survivor, but always reacting, watching from a distance, understanding very little of her own life, let alone the lives of others. Death brings her into the hearts and minds of those she has known—even her killer—as she accesses their memories and sees anew the meaning of her own. In her nine days as an aswang, while she considers whether to exact vengeance on her killer, she also traces back, finally able to see what led these two lost souls to a crushingly inevitable conclusion. In A Tiny Upward Shove, the debut novelist Melissa Chadburn charts the heartbreaking journeys of two of society’s castoffs as they make their way to each other and their roles as criminal and victim. What does it mean to be on the brink? When are those moments that change not only our lives but our very selves? And how, in this impossible world, full of cruelty and negligence, can we rouse ourselves toward mercy?

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Age

Page Count

271

Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published Date

ISBN 10

0374716501

ISBN 13

9780374716509

Book's by Melissa Febos

Abandon Me

Abandon Me

Abandon Me

Abandon Me

Shame on You

Shame on You

A Tiny Upward Shove

A Tiny Upward Shove

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