I couldn't get through this title. It ended up not being for me, but I hope it finds a hope with other readers.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Girlhood by Melissa Febos was incredible. The writing is so heartwrenching, honest, raw, authentic and incredibly sad and universal if you're a girl, woman, mother, sister, etc. From the very first chapter, I was hooked immediately and it saddened me to share so many experiences and truths with the author. Highly recommend reading and giving it to a friend to bask in the glory of all that is Melissa Febos.

Melissa Febos has a way of writing that simultaneously feels like a knife in your heart and the sweetest embrace. I don't know how she does it. This book will make you reevaluate everything you thought you knew about the world and your place in it.

I really enjoyed this feminist memoir. Mostly lived experiences as a woman from the authors life, she also weaves other women's experiences from interviews, and research from herself and other feminist researchers. At times the chapters felt a little disjointed but that is a really picky criticism of a really phenomenal collection of essays. Thanks to netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This is a beautiful beautiful collection of essays that is simply hard to put down. I read this author's work for the first time, and I will definitely be checking out her previous books too. Its a lyrical picture portraying the life of women, what constitutes their life and how unbalanced the world is in their favour even today. A must read for everyone in general! Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

These stories were inspirational and relatable. I feel that this book could be used for future generations of young girls as well.

The way these essays circle around various touch points, acknowledging first and then returning, pulling all the threads together like a loom, is brilliant.

"Celestial Hearts: A Review of “Girlhood” by Melissa Febos"
by Bruce Owens Grimm
Published here: https://lit.newcity.com/2021/04/08/celestial-hearts-a-review-of-melissa-febos-girlhood%e2%80%a8/

Trilogies are traditionally reserved for fiction or movies. But Melissa Febos is here to disrupt the traditional with her essay collection, “Girlhood.” Febos builds off the worlds she created in two previous books, “Whip Smart” and “Abandon Me,” with eight essays that are a phenomenal, beautiful mix of investigation and lyricism to delve into the trauma and wonders of being a woman. The continuation of threads from her earlier books is extraordinary, not only in terms of craft, but because it shows the complexity of life, how one event or relationship can influence others, and how the unrelenting grip of the patriarchy affects us all.

As Febos says in “Thank You for Taking Care of Yourself,” after she is triggered at a cuddle party, “Patriarchy is the house in which we all live. It possesses all of Western culture and industry and has for centuries.” This passage appears a few essays after “The Mirror Test,” in which the author discusses Heinrich Kramer’s 1487 treatise “Malleus Maleficarum,” which called for “the arrest and torture” of women considered to be witches. Women “who had reputations for being independent or free with their views or disagreed with him [Kramer] publicly” were the women he wanted silenced by calling them witches and the government aided this by passing “a bill that allowed men to prosecute witches as heretics.” Women getting harassed or abused on social media, in politics, on the street, in their own homes, and often killed for simply being a woman are prime examples of how the patriarchy continues to possess us. Febos, who masterfully weaves the patriarchy’s current and historical influence throughout the book, enhances the emotional impact of the theoretical and historical by showing how they ripple through the real-life stories of women she interviews for her essays.

Her own story is present, too, which provides the connective tissue throughout her trilogy. Febos’ relationship with Donika is a highlight of the book, because here we have a queer relationship that is loving, tender and supportive. The writing doesn’t center this relationship, but for queer readers like me, it’s an image we don’t see represented enough in any art form, so its inclusion is a joyous moment. It also connects “Girlhood” to Febos’ last book, “Abandon Me,” which is, in part, about her unhealthy relationship with a previous partner, by showing us how she, and her intimate relationships, have evolved.

Reading her earlier two books is not required to have a meaningful experience. Like all great art, “Girlhood” stands on its own as we get a full picture of Febos’ journey in finding her own value in a world that actively prevents women and other marginalized folx from doing so. Febos shows us, the women and queers who long to do the same, that it can be a difficult journey, but not an impossible one.

This is a special book. I will certainly use excerpts in my classroom. It is powerful and unique. It is fresh.

“Girlhood” is a queer feminist memoir. It’s also a cultural study on how girls and women use their bodies to gain power, to fit in and to escape. And it’s a coming of age story about worth, trauma, boundaries, consent, shame, and perception.

Melissa Febos is a force who reclaims her sense of self. Even if it takes a few decades and countless hours in therapy. She teaches us that it's okay to recover out loud and how to accept ourselves and our transgressions. After reading this book, I realize that I'm not nearly as broken as I think I am. And I can forgive the girl that I once was.

Special thanks to Bloomsbury for access to the e-galley via NetGalley. This is my honest review.

This was my first time reading Melissa Febos' work, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about her essay collection since putting it down. I desperately wanted to read through this in one sitting but made myself pause as it felt each story required immense space to breathe and impact the reader. I will be recommending this to everyone I know this summer.

GIRLHOOD by Melissa Febos is a collection of essays by an award-winning author. Booklist gave this much anticipated title a starred review and Publishers Weekly described it as a "dark coming-of-age story [that] impresses at every turn." Sadly, for me, it was just too dark and I am therefore giving it a neutral rating of three.

I don’t even know how to talk about this book. It was brilliant and beautiful, but hard to read because of how much it seemed to reach into me. I will say I struggled with the first couple of essays in here. I wasn’t sure I would click with Melissa Febos’ writing style. I wasn’t sure the material was something I necessarily wanted to get into. But, this book got stronger and stronger the more it went on. I can’t deny how much it began to grip me.

Febos captures vulnerability in a very specific, yet undeniably understandable way. This book was a challenging reading experience for me, because it felt like I was being slapped in every essay I read. I mean, it was emotionally jarring how acutely Febos describes particular experiences, particular feelings. With “Intrusions” and “Thank You For Taking Care of Yourself” especially, I was just astonished at the way she is able to describe such a singular yet constantly present overlapping of emotions and thoughts, pushes and pulls. Febos writes of her own interior life so boldly that it reached into mine and woke me up in a way.

As long as it took me to actually make my way through all of the essays, I was also constantly thinking about and talking about this book. These essays made me confront some experiences of my own that I would rather have not thought about, but ultimately I’m grateful that I did. I’m grateful to know I am not alone in them. And Febos’ vocalization of her experiences, her creation of something as concise as an essay, helped me begin to vocalize my own and lean into ways I can create something from my secrets too.

I am so happy to have read this and to have read it all the way through. There were many times I wanted to give up, because it was too hard and too uncomfortable. But, ultimately there is so much warmth here in addition to all of that big, scary emotion. I mean this in the nicest way possible, but reading this felt like a really tough therapy session. And, I’d like to book another appointment. Great read, will definitely be keeping my on Febos and looking to read more from her.

Thank you NetGalley and Bloomsbury USA for an e-arc!

“It is better to choose your pain than to let it choose you,” a young Melissa Febos tells herself in the opening to her second essay collection Girlhood.

This phrase repeats with slight variation throughout the essay “Prologue: Scarification” as a pulsing refrain, a musical heartbeat carrying the reader through a winding account of moments from Febos’ childhood. This prologue both primes and disarms the reader, giving a brief catalog of injury that forefronts the body while pulling us close to that injury by narrating in the second person. By writing from this perspective, she eliminates any illusion of the comfort offered by distance from the very beginning, forcing us to experience these moments along with Febos herself. This opening comes from a narrator that feels distinctly young. It’s as if we begin with the Febos from her childhood, who would rather invite hurt than fall victim to it. This idea of choosing pain as a way of healing is the premature conclusion that the rest of the collection works to unravel.

The eight essays of this collection are acts of uncovering, a practice of searching and finding. Febos works through her own personal experiences growing up as a woman, such as the self-loathing she inflicted on her body and the unwanted desire that was projected on it by men whom she felt compelled to please. She then combines her personal narrative with interviews she conducted with other women about their experiences, many of them mirroring her own. This makes her essays feel expansive. While we often linger in moments from Febos’ life, each is integrated into a larger narrative about society—whether that be another woman recounting her sexual assault, a reflection on Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth, a catalog of media that glamorizes stalking, a retelling of the myth of the Hecatoncheires, or a meditation on Henry Harlow’s experiments conducted on monkeys about skin hunger.

Febos isn’t just describing a personal struggle, but the struggle of an entire gender that faces a society that emphasizes the comfort of men over women and that values physical appearance above all else.

The entire collection is written with calculated devastation. Many moments tear through the reader’s skin, exposing a hurt or fear that was long concealed. This line from the essay “Kettle Holes” has stayed with me even weeks after reading it: “There is no good strategy in a rigged game. There are only new ways to lose.”

However, as much as this book lingers in difficult topics, it is also largely a book about love in its multitude of forms.

“Wild America” explores Febos’ romantic relationships, both good and bad, and her relationship with her body. The larger topic of nature rests beneath these explorations as a sort of grounding center, a place to return. She focuses on the shared sublimity inhabited by love, sex, the body, and nature. “I’m sorry, I whispered and squeezed my own shoulder. I love you, I said.”

GIRLHOOD COVER.jpg
In “Les Calanques,” Febos chronicles her brief but powerful friendship with a French man named Ahmed as they bond over their shared addiction. “I wanted to tell Ahmed that I loved him, because I did. We were in a kind of love, I think: the kind that two lonely people with similar hearts and the same problem can fall into; the kind that has nothing to do with sex.”

In my favorite essay of the collection, “Thesmophria,” Febos explores her relationship with her mother. Specifically, she explores how love drove her to hide the most painful parts of herself from her mother as a means of protection. “It is so painful to be loved,” Febos writes. “Intolerable, even.” She tells their story parallel to that of Demeter and Persephone, emphasizing the idea of leaving—or perhaps, more accurately, being taken—and returning. Just as Demeter’s grief brought on the first winter, the magnitude of love Febos’ mother has for her is palpable through the writing.

This collection begins and closes with a confrontation of her younger self. In the prologue, we begin in her voice, commanding herself through injury. In the concluding essay, Febos imagines her twenty-year-old self watching her as she attends a residency in Cassis. It reads almost as an acknowledgment, an acceptance, of her past. While she carries it with her, allowing it space within her present life, it is no longer who she is.

Melissa Febos dissects girlhood, ripping it apart until we are left with only its beating heart. By the end, she hands the reader an essay collection lush with bodily experiences, cultural analysis, media criticism, and classical myth. Relentless in its emotion and saturated with truth, Girlhood will leave you breathless and raw, feeling both that a chasm has been open in your chest and that a hand has been extended to pull you out.

What does it mean to be female? This book explores that question in so many unique and compelling ways. I'll be gifting this widely.

Girlhood is another standout essay collection by Melissa Febos. I'm in awe of this book's unflinching reflection on the violent atmosphere girls are raised in, especially those of us who developed early and received sexual attention too young to escape it. Febos uses interviews, literature and film, as well as personal experiences, to unpack the challenging nuances of consent, power and our relationship to our bodies. My favorite essays traced the origin of the word "slut" and what it means to be a woman deemed *bad*, and a chilling look at the normalization of "peeping Toms" and the terror of being stalked in your own home. I want to reread her essay about "empty consent" once I've had some time to digest it: she unpacks how women negotiate sexual encounters they don't want in order to survive unscathed, and our lack of language to understand and describe experiences that don't leave us traumatized but are nonetheless assault or violations. Melissa Febos's intelligence, curiosity and talent drips from each page. This is an essay collection to return to again and again.

I've long appreciated Melissa Febos's writing, and this book certainly lived up to my expectations. A few of the essays have previously been published elsewhere, though I believe some may have been expanded here, and I appreciated seeing them in a new/broader context. I would certainly teach some of these essays to creative writing students or upper-level undergrads in an essay/non-fiction class.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for this advanced reader copy!

Girlhood by Melissa Febos centers on coming of age into girlhood. For many of us women, we remember ‘girlhood’ as those awkward years, typically around middle school times, where we still feel young, innocent, and vulnerable, but have begun to be sexualized by others. The book contains a mixture of her own experience, psychology of aging, literary references, and current cultural examples. This book is important and timely and I would encourage people, especially men, to read this. My only critique is that sometimes it jumped around and it would take me a minute to acclimate to the next section of writing.

Girlhood by Melissa Febos is an important book that is focused on coming of age into girlhood - that awkward time of feeling young and innocent, yet becoming sexualized in the eyes of others. The author does an excellent job at integrating real life examples, her own and those of the women she interviewed, with psychology, pop culture, and literature. My only reason for not giving this book a higher rating is that while the narrative is unified by theme within each essay, the author jumps around a lot with their examples, which for me made it harder to connect with the book and I often found myself having to reread a few sentences each time that happened.
3.5 stars

Advanced copy provided courtesy of the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Content warning: sexuality, nonconsensual sexual contact and rape, sexual harassment and assault, sexualization of pubescent girls

I loved this book! What a powerful and heartbreaking collection.

Growing up is hard, puberty is weird. I hope girls coming of age now have more outlets to talk, learn, and explore their own wants, desires and questions.

Enjoyed reading about the author's own experience as a girl and growing into a woman, felt like I was having a (very smart!) conversation with a friend!