Review by New York Times Review
IN "ABANDON ME," Melissa Febos explores, among other things, the legacy of her two fathers: her birth father, a Native American named Jon, with whom she reconnects over the course of the book, and the father who raised her, a sea captain she refers to simply as "the Captain." It is not lost on her that both fathers come from and represent worlds many see as relics of history. "Eyes always widened when I told people that my father was a sea captain. Do those still exist?" The subtitle of Febos's book is "Memoirs," perhaps in recognition of the way it circles back around different stories, weaving together an exploration of her origins with moments taken from her childhood, addiction, recovery and her work as a dominatrix (which was the subject of her first memoir, "Whip Smart"), before progressing through a self-destructive love affair. Yet even for those with a more conventional family history than hers, origin stories never really have one starting point. Think of the biographer's recurring problem of how far back in a subject's lineage to begin. Some of the most enjoyable parts of "Abandon Me" come when Febos explores her histories, weaving in tidbits like the popularity among Nantucket sea wives of the "'he'sat-home,' an early ceramic dildo." Less successful are the sections given over to Febos's obsessive affair with a married woman named Amaia. As she recounts Amaia's increasingly possessive behavior, we feel her pain but don't see more than the familiar outlines of someone who loves a person she knows is bad for her, tries and repeatedly fails to leave before she finally does. Her digressions into texts ranging from Homer and Jung to Peter Jackson's early film "Heavenly Creatures" are often fascinating, but they come to feel like attempts to make the affair stand in for more than what it wants to be, or to provide relief from its ultimate hollowness. There's a reason many of the most powerful accounts of obsessive love, like Annie Ernaux's "Simple Passion" and Marguerite Duras's "The Lover," are spare and stark in form: They deny us the same relief the obsessive lover is denied. In a recent piece in "Poets & Writers," Febos describes the experience of teaching writing to young women, so many of whom are afraid that relating their own experience will be seen as self-indulgent. Febos is certainly right about the sexism behind this perception. Reading her book, however, I kept thinking that whatever condemnation and self-consciousness accompany writing about the self, the commercial pressures have been running the other way for some time now. At one point, Febos recounts a meeting with her agent where she talks about her obsession with King Philip's War and her desire to write historical fiction. The agent responds, "Readers aren't into Native Americans." He urges her to write something "more urban, more edgy." Many writers I know have had similar experiences - and if women are especially told they are navel-gazing for writing about themselves, it is equally important to recognize the ways they are guided away from writing about anything else. Febos reports that she realized the story of King Philip was "my own story calling." It's not a reader's job - or a reviewer's - to tell writers what book they wish had been written instead, but I wonder what might have happened if Febos had directed her lyrical gifts to King Philip or to shaping the fragments assembled here into a fully realized work that could both report history and imagine it fully. LAURA TANENBAUM is an associate professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
Febos' (Whip Smart, 2010) second book is a collection of self-aware, stylish, autobiographical essays on love, addiction, and inheritance. Exploring her embarrassment over what she sees as her endless need for love, she touches on her Native American, Puerto Rican, and European heritages. She draws from her youth, growing up on Cape Cod with a veritable (and often absent) sea captain father, from her post-high-school-dropout days spent high on heroin, and from classical philosophy, psychology, mythology, and literature. In the longest essay in the collection, which shares the book's title and occupies more than half its pages with its 62 vignettes, she bonds with the Native American birth father to whom she'd always been contentedly disconnected while painfullly coming to terms with her relationship with a woman she loves obsessively. Febos harnesses language, moods, actions, and settings with precision. A professor of creative writing, she stuns with sentences that are a credit to her craft and will no doubt inspire her readers.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Febos's (Whip Smart) second memoir is part lovesick devotional and part meditation on the intersection between desire and identity. She outlines the progression of a doomed relationship in exquisitely romantic detail ("Her mouth the soft nail on which my life snagged, and tore open") alongside the story of reconnecting with her birth father, a Wampanoag Native American and "career drug addict and alcoholic." As she explores her native roots through the lens of historical trauma and cultural erasure, she finds an explanation for a viscerally felt absence and her willingness to be "colonized" by a controlling lover. She captures the contradictions of female sexuality, complicated further when the object of one's desire is another woman, and delves into the push and pull of the other relationships that molded her, as with her adoptive father, a sea captain whose fierce love and frequent absence were contradictory formative influences: "Every time he left port, we wrecked again." Her mastery over metaphor is astonishing: describing a moment of heartache, she writes, "I was the sound of breaking. Pedestrians and bicyclists looked around, covered their ears." What might be mere navel-gazing for a less brilliant author is made powerfully universal here. Though the particulars are hers, just about anyone can relate to the feeling of a chasm opening up inside. Febros's awakening to her full identity, even its ugliness, is a powerful and redemptive epic. Agent: Ethan Bassoff, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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