Reviews with content warning for Addiction - Body Work

I didn’t know what I expect when I pick up this book but it sure was different from my imagination. Sometimes, these are happy accidents, and this book was one of them.

It was a book on how to write about yourself, but to simplify it that way is diminishing its powerful message. In some way, the book was part memoir, as the author brought her own personal narrative into it to illustrate how she had woven the intricacies of her experience in the process of her craft.

Melissa Febos wrote with a tenacity and intensity that was overwhelming at first, when she dived into her sexual encounters and erotic desires and how one can write about sex. But once I settled into her fervent honesty, she had shown me the underlying purpose of the things she included, the wisdom of someone who had written as a mean to survive. In that I see myself, not at that level but starting to climb those first steps into writing something that makes sense of it all. Whether publication was the goal or not.

If I was familiar with her works prior to reading this, I might have had a less discombobulated start, but I actually have read an essay of her in the book “What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About” before, and hadn’t realized that until I was in the middle of reading Body Work. The fact that I recognized her writing from a collection I read years ago (and didn’t really remember it that well) really showed how much of an impression her writing had made. Will be looking forward to read her other works, even if the honesty promised by those books scares me.

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kjboldon's review

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challenging emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

5.0

Febos writes what feels like a manifesto for truth telling. Part memoir, part writing manual, part research project, she argued passionately and urgently yet quietly (not hysterically, in the Freudian sense) form the power of personal narrative for healing oneself, for sharing with others, and for demolishing the walls built with unspoken prejudice and power. Bracing stuff.

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courtneyfalling's review

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informative reflective fast-paced

3.0

I expected to rate this memoir a lot higher, but it didn't go nearly deep enough nor specific enough into what I expected. There was no mention of writing about illness or disability, for example, which is a huge component of any bodily writing, whether or not 'explicitly' about disability. And I'm perpetually interested in how to (and whether to) ethically write about other people, and this was just so surface level on it compared to what I really thought this could've done.

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