Melissa Febos on Rejecting the Patriarchy’s Bad Ideas

In this interview, Ruth Joffre talks with Melissa Febos about her new craft book, ‘Body Work,’ the therapeutic effects of writing and reading, the ethics of writing about other people, and more.

As a writer and teacher, I’m constantly fascinated by the ways we teach the craft of writing and the stories people tell about that craft. Some writers insist that they never think about craft or that craft cannot be taught, while a number of craft maxims (such as “show, don’t tell” and “kill your darlings”) have become famous and are frequently discussed in creative writing classrooms. For those who frequently turn to craft books, patterns start to emerge: rules, common phrases, the use of overly prescriptive language.

Melissa Febos’s Body Work is another kind of craft book entirely. A collection of four essays, the book offers a window into the author’s way of thinking and being in the world as a writer. In the process, readers will find sound advice, hard-won lessons, rules and reasons to break rules, and a model for how to continuously nourish one’s creative process. In this conversation, Melissa and I talk about the power of personal narrative, the ethics of writing about other people, and the need to have compassion when writing about yourself.

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Ruth Joffre: In the Author’s Note of Body Work, you write, “This is not a craft book in the traditional sense.” In the process of writing this book, did you find yourself having to work against or position yourself in relation to this craft tradition, and, if so, how did you navigate that experience?

Melissa Febos: For better or worse, mostly better, I wasn’t thinking about craft-book conventions (insofar as they exist) as I was writing Body Work. Each chapter really sprung directly out of an interest in navigating and clarifying my own thoughts around their topics—whether it was writing and thinking about sex or the broader traditions of the confessional or the many ways that personal writing functions in my own life—and also organizing the beliefs I have arrived at over my years of teaching and writing. The first essay, “In Praise of Navel Gazing,” really came out of a kind of frustration and weariness of repeating myself over and over to my students and other writers, rebutting the arguments against personal writing and trying to illuminate the biases that animate them, all in order to help my students give themselves permission to tell their own stories.

I actually never had the thought, I’m going to write a book of craft essays. I just had the urgent instinct to write a series of individual essays that I eventually realized coalesced around a shared theme or constellation of themes, which is how my process of writing essay collections often unfurls.

RJ: Your essays draw from a wide range of sources, including literature, history, psychology, music, religion, and more. When you sit down to write an essay, do you specifically seek out these sources while researching the subject, or do these materials accrete in the course of your daily life?

MF: Both, really. When I start writing an essay, I really just yield to my own curiosity about a subject, and my curiosity tends to be voracious. I cast a wide net—reading books, getting recommendations based on conversations with friends, googling to my heart’s delight—really indulging my tendency for obsession, and my attention becomes attuned to everything (and anything!) that relates to my subject(s). It can feel quite overwhelming sometimes, actually. A small number of those sources end up referenced in the eventual essay—only what feels necessary—but they all contribute to my thinking in and about it.

RJ: Taken together, the essays in Body Work present not only lessons on the craft of writing but real-life examples of how to move through the world as a writer, drawing from your experiences, successes, and mistakes. Why was it important to you to model these ways of being and thinking?

MF: I think one of the undergirding appeals of nonfiction in general and personal writing in particular is the presence of a first-person narrator who is speaking from experience. There is no one I trust more to advise me on a subject than the person who shares my experience and interest in that subject. I mean this particularly in terms of prescriptive writing. As a person in recovery from a lot of things, I have learned the particular magic of another person’s hard-won insights into my own similar problems. It’s just easier to hear some things from a little farther down the road I’m traveling. So there is an argument for it, sure, but once again I wasn’t really thinking of this when I was writing. I was just sorting through and figuring out my own thoughts, and it turns out that most of what I believe comes directly from experience, so my evidence when I’m writing rhetorically often comes in the form of firsthand knowledge.

RJ: The first essay, “In Praise of Navel Gazing,” is a powerful condemnation of the ways that personal narrative as a form has been maligned and ridiculed by those afraid of its power. What advice would you give to a writer who find themselves in the position of having to defend personal narratives and protect their own belief in their project?

MF: Well, I think arguing with everyone who makes derogatory remarks about personal writing is probably energy better directed toward one’s own work. Producing excellent art out of personal experience is the best rebuttal of arguments for its inferiority.

That said, it is proven (by many studies whose findings have been published in peer-reviewed journals—the work of Dr. James Pennebaker is a great place to start reading or to cite) that personal writing about provocative topics often has therapeutic effects on the mind and body. And while the therapeutic effects of writing are not guaranteed and have no guaranteed bearing on the aesthetic quality of the art made out of it, to theorize that such effects preclude aesthetic quality is a logical fallacy and in my opinion nothing more than thinly veiled bigotry.

Producing excellent art out of personal experience is the best rebuttal of arguments for its inferiority.

The best advice I can give to those writing personal work and to those dismissing it (these are not mutually exclusive groups) is to sincerely inquire whether their assumptions about the genre come out of their own experience as a reader and writer or whether they are simply the internalized voices of those who most benefit from the silence of those most likely to write about their lives.

I expect that most readers have absorbed many intellectually and aesthetically interesting works of personal nonfiction, works that are no more indulgent of their authors’ egos than comparable works of fiction. Probably it was a teacher, a review, a classmate, an interview with a writer they respect that inscribed the bias on their consciousness. My experience of being a writer is one of continual waking, of striving for better discernment between my own ideas and those conditioned in me by a culture that does not value my sovereignty or that of most historically marginalized groups of people.

RJ: At one point in “Mind Fuck,” you note, “I’ve spent my whole life being prescribed narratives about my own body.” How do you recognize when you are prescribing to imposed narratives, whether in life or on the page, and what advice would you give to a writer just starting to break free?

MF: For me, it has been about cultivating a practice of awareness. Creating a space between my thought and any associated action or reinforcement. That is, learning to ask myself, Wait, is that my thought/belief, or is that the heterosexist white supremacist patriarchy piping its bullshit brainwashing through the speakers of my own interiority? Like, do I really think no one cares about my intensely crafted story? Do I care what that one asshole thinks of my body or my art? Do I actually prefer small asses to fat ones?

It is by recognizing the insidious terrorism of my social conditioning that I become more able to reject it, to replace it with my own convictions. I’ve had a practice of journaling every morning for over a decade now, and I have a list of reminders that I write out by hand every day. One of them is “Today I reject the patriarchy’s bad ideas.” Because I am reminded incessantly what I am supposed to think—by TV, magazines, other people’s casual body-shaming—and to resist it, I need to counter it with just as consistent alternatives. For instance, when those thoughts arise, reminding myself: I am interested in art made out of experience. I only care about the opinions of people I respect. I prefer fat asses to thin but recognize the beauty and integrity of all kinds of asses.

Honestly, meditation has been a huge part of creating this mental breathing room. Also, surrounding myself with other people doing similar work. I attend multiple groups per week—different kinds of mutual aid/consciousness-raising situations—in which I collaborate in this awakening kind of work (whether it focuses on antiracism, recovery, or meditation) with other people who are committed to it. Community is such an integral part of any conscious change.

Today I reject the patriarchy’s bad ideas.

RJ: In “A Big Shitty Party: Six Parables for Writing About Other People,” you write, among other things, about the ethics of writing about real people. Is developing an ethical code an essential part of developing craft as a nonfiction writer? How do you teach the ethics of creative nonfiction to your students?

MF: Absolutely. It’s unavoidable. Even if a writer chooses to ignore the issue, that is itself an ethical code. Over the course of publishing four books, it has been an area of significant growth and change for me as a writer and a person.

I don’t think an ethical code is something one can teach, per se. I do talk about it a lot with my students, how important it is to consider and to make decisions based on their beliefs rather than their fears. I give them a lot of examples of ways they might handle implicating others in their work and the consequences of each. I share the opinions of other writers, ones who approach it from a variety of positions. I also talk a lot about my own trajectory of handling it, how experiences have refined my thinking and my personal code around it.

When it comes to scary or emotionally challenging experiences, especially unavoidable ones, I find that we sometimes reach for simplistic rules of behavior. We want a single guideline, so we don’t have to carefully wend our way through each encounter. For me, that has never worked. I mean, in the sense of simplifying my experience or the conflicts that might arise. There is no shortcut through a compassionate and ethical handling of other people’s stories. Whatever course we take, there is a cost and a burden of responsibility.

RJ: “The Return,” the final essay in the book, focuses on the art of confession and includes a series of reflections on your past selves, including yourself as a girl and as a new author. How do you maintain compassion and perspective in writing about yourself, and, in the event that this compassion falters, what do you do?

MF: Oh, Ruth. It’s such a work in progress! There are past selves (and even past things I’ve written) that I have a really hard time facing with compassion. The creative process, specifically that of personal writing, has been my best method (along with therapy) of finding a way to love my past selves, to look at my past ignorance and mistakes with empathy, forgiveness, and, eventually, sometimes, love. In a way, this whole book is about that process, how it dovetails with the aesthetic processes.

I have this trick that I use a lot in my daily life, when I am trying to be more generous and patient with myself. I just imagine someone else whom I love—a friend, a student, a child—and I consider how I would respond if it were them struggling instead of me. I would never, ever treat someone else I loved (or even someone I hated!) the way I sometimes have treated myself, with that kind of impatience and expectation. In a way, writing personal narrative is a version of this exercise. I am externalizing my past self, creating a character out of her who then becomes objective to me; she is no longer me, though I am drawing her with the colors of my own memory. I am telling myself a story about the past, in which I can relate to my former self as a character—in all her innocence and error, her vulnerability and grace. It is easier to access love that way, and then graft it back into my present self.