Girlhood

"I’m so in love with this book. Reading Melissa Febos is a masterclass in essay writing. This felt like kin to my own book, although I’m sure lots of people have read this and felt it a kindred spirit to their own work. Febos is trying to make sense of what it means to be in our bodies as women as we grow up. She starts from her earliest childhood memories—young and rampaging through the woods, with a delight in the physical that I think we can all remember from childhood, before it became more complicated. She starts in that mode, where she has a fledgling sense of sexuality, although it doesn’t yet have a name. It’s not been contextualised by society’s expectations of how we should package our desire, who we should want or how we should present our wanting. She shows this lovely little window into the potential for girls to grow into our bodies and sexualities before we are set upon by social expectations and patriarchal structures that confine, censure and control those sexualities. She gives us a little glimmer, then goes into the ways that happened for her. She was precocious, grew into her body before most of her peers, and was singled out—experienced sexual shaming. I wanted to sing out with recognition when I read these pages; someone had put words to something I hadn’t understood about my own life before. I had a very strong sense of sexuality from a young age and I was deeply curious, sexually exploratory, but very quickly, that sense of sexuality was shamed by my peers. It changed the trajectory of every sexual experience afterwards in my teen years. After being labelled a ‘slut,’ there was a certain sense of: Well, so be it. I wasn’t going to fight it. A lot of the dangerous or self-destructive actions I took after that I’ve never really fully understood. Because I chose them, to a degree. I pursued them. There’s a conflict between an active sense of desire and longing and curiosity and the more toxic ways I felt censured and shamed for it, and the defiance that was required to keep behaving that way. The internalised shame was messy in my head and still is, as you can probably tell. She articulates that same experience so beautifully and with such intellect. I’m enormously grateful for her and her work. She has amazing assurance. She’ll go from Lacan to Nicholas Cage’s Valley Girl , to Darwin, and a bit of Jamaica Kincaid thrown in there. This will all be in one essay, which she pulls together with her own experiences. So she brings all these influences, these scenes, these thinkers, these cultural artefacts together to find her way through. I think the idea here that the forces that shape us in puberty determine the decisions we make well into adulthood was at the heart of my investigation that became Amphibian and why this time in life is worthy of having a voice in literature."