The wonder of Melissa Febos is that she convinced me that she needed to write this book, or rather experience the growth process she outlined therein, in order to, as she puts it, “find aloneness in the company of the one [she] loved”. Reading memoir by a prolific ingenue like Febos makes me hyper-skeptical: needn’t an author be self-realized / self-aware to a point of worthiness of writing memoir in the first place? I’m almost like “ how could she possibly be a Love addict when she’s written so much about Love before without that particular thing explicated? (that said I haven’t read everything she’s written so maybe she did but I think the point still stands) but doing some meta-evaluation of that thought (as anne-laure le cunff encourages in tiny experiments which i just read) I realize it’s related to a certain idolatry i hold of accomplished authors and perhaps an insecurity/lack of trust in myself in regards to the validity of the how i conceive of my own life and past experiences. trusting myself to know myself (and my knowing in general, i suppose) is a theme that keeps showing up lately and i didn’t mean for this to become a book review x journal entry collab but here we are 👍👍👍 anyway Melissa Febos is a deeply gifted writer, I took down so many quotes from this book, and I would love to make myself a syllabus from all of the readings and references she cites in it.
