Abandon Me | 
pickThis is beautifully written. It's about the author's journey to find herself. Sort of. It's hard to describe. She wrote an earlier memoir about her time as a dominatrix and heroin addict which I feel compelled to go back and also read.
#BookSpinBingo square 4
@TheAromaofBooks
Well! I‘m certainly itching to read this ASAP. Melissa Febos and 3 other LGBTQ writer friends each read about 20 mins of their work and I was pretty much blown away.
Such powerful, lovely work by all! 💗👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Details here if anyone is interested: https://www.facebook.com/events/716415805229666/?ti=icl
"I understood early that love was a mission to heal one's own heart. We are attracted to the people who can open our wounds." P121
pickSo, I tore through this, and loved it. Unflinchingly honest, brave as hell, super-smart, and beautifully - really beautifully - written. Highly, highly recommended.
pickWhile the narrative thread here is loose and frayed, the writing is beautiful, intimate and raw. She focuses mainly on three relationships: a mostly absent biological father, an adoptive, sea captain father, and a long-distance affair with a manipulative, married woman. As the title implies, she looks at how to cope when those you love are absent or unavailable.
This memoir is so beautifully written and thought provoking...my brain is on overload from all I've read this weekend...there have been some very heavy hitters! I would much rather stay up reading this than go to sleep, but alas... I need to be functional for work tomorrow.
pickBeautiful writing. Compelling look at her life. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Abandonment by a lover won't kill us. But it awakens the parts of us that remember when it could.
pickA beautifully written, brutally honest book about losing yourself in love, finding out where you came from, addiction, and telling your own stories. Febos creates wonderful similes and images and insightful, hard-hitting truths. I did feel like the last piece about her destructive long-distance relationship with a woman and connecting with her Wampanoag birth father felt unwieldy. She should have divided it into 2 essays. #NativeReads #QueerBooks
"her face so soft with hope that it broke me open like a street melon--the sun-soaked ones they sell on Nostrand Avenue in summer"
"The strange sensation of seeping back into myself"
#QueerBooks
"I already knew ... that every love is a sea monster in whose belly we learn to pray." #QueerBooks #NativeReads
Febos sees herself in her queer indigenous grandmother, who hid both those parts of herself. #QueerBooks #NativeReads
My current read.
Excited to get back to this book now that the school semester is over! Also excited about my curry chicken pho and grilled cheese.
bailedSo disappointing. Febos digress way too much in each essay. Like she'll talk about love and then talk about something in history that is completely unrelated to the essay. She'll go back to talking about love and then goes into different topic also completely unrelated to the essay.
I really wanted to like this, but the digression was too much.
"I thought that the host of the party decided when it ended and her guests went home. But feelings have terrible manners-- they are like children, or drunks. They are mad. They gorge as the starved will gorge, until they are sick, until their stomachs split. As you or I would, if we were exiled for thirty years. They do not leave when you want them to. They leave when they are finished." #abandonme #melissafebos
"I no longer want to change my name. I never did, really. I only wanted to know where I ended and everything else began, and I still do, in these oceanic days. Like Franny Glass, I have begged of myself a prayer, begged of my name an answer. Made them the same powerful thing. Aren't they both gestures of surrender? Melissa may not be another word for mercy, but every name is a name for God."
Whoa, great choice of epigraphs.
Me being silly on my cruise. Was gone a week. No internet. I missed you all Litsy! This is a great memoir. I love her writing. Very lyrical and slightly vague but the larger theme is so poignant. So glad to be back on dry land. P.S. I learned I like fishnet stockings.
pickThis book absolutely ruined me. These essays on love and loss and pain and searching just.. destroyed me. Please read it. It's stunning. Fuck.
Febos on first listening to the woman who would become her beloved: "I carried a story of my own into that room, but her voice silenced everything in me."
Excellent beginning! This glimpse of Febos's book-filled childhood pushes all my bibliophile buttons! #Bloomsbury #memoir
so-so#2017Book51
Most of the chapters in this memoir are filled with beautiful imagery and thought-provoking prose. Other chapters, however, feel like Febos is using way too many metaphors instead of just telling us what happened. The chapters about the people in her life are great. When she slides into discussing various psychologists and how their theories apply to her life, though, the book starts to feel more like an essay for a psychology class.
This is the extent of my #BooksAndTreats for today. It's also doubling as my supper tonight, because I'm an irresponsible adult and haven't gone grocery shopping for a few weeks. #RiotGrams
Left to right: have read, am reading, am reading.
I could not possibly be happier that I was approved for this on NetGalley! I've been looking forward to it since AWP 2015, when I saw Melissa Febos give the most rousing talk on a craft panel about woman writers innovating new/nontraditional forms of creative nonfiction. So yep, I'll be starting to read this immediately. 📖
