Girlhood

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What to expect

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
National Bestseller
Lambda Literary Award Finalist

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME * NPR * The Washington Post * Kirkus Reviews * Washington Independent Review of Books * The Millions * Electric Literature * Ms Magazine * Entropy Magazine * Largehearted Boy * Passerbuys

“Irreverent and original.” –New York Times

“Magisterial.” –The New Yorker

“An intoxicating writer.” –The Atlantic

“A classic!” –Mary Karr

“A true light in the dark.” –Stephanie Danler

“An essential, heartbreaking project.” –Carmen Maria Machado

A gripping set of stories about the forces that shape girls and the adults they become. A wise and brilliant guide to transforming the self and our society.

In her powerful new book, critically acclaimed author Melissa Febos examines the narratives women are told about what it means to be female and what it takes to free oneself from them.

When her body began to change at eleven years old, Febos understood immediately that her meaning to other people had changed with it. By her teens, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong. Over time, Febos increasingly questioned the stories she’d been told about herself and the habits and defenses she’d developed over years of trying to meet others’ expectations. The values she and so many other women had learned in girlhood did not prioritize their personal safety, happiness, or freedom, and she set out to reframe those values and beliefs.

Blending investigative reporting, memoir, and scholarship, Febos charts how she and others like her have reimagined relationships and made room for the anger, grief, power, and pleasure women have long been taught to deny.
Written with Febos’ characteristic precision, lyricism, and insight, Girlhood is a philosophical treatise, an anthem for women, and a searing study of the transitions into and away from girlhood, toward a chosen self.

Critics Review

  • Febos’s own voice is so irreverent and original. The aim of this book, though, is not simply to tell about her own life, but to listen to the pulses of many others’. In her author’s note, Febos writes that she has ‘found company in the stories of other women, and the revelation of all our ordinariness has itself been curative.’ This solidarity puts Girlhood in a feminist canon that includes Febos’s idol, Adrienne Rich, and Maggie Nelson’s theory-minded masterpieces: smart, radical company, and not ordinary at all.

    The New York Times Book Review

  • Anyone who has ever been a girl or a woman will recognize the patterns Febos uncovers: the unwanted touch, the expectations of our bodies, the way we become complicit in the traps laid out for us along the way by the patriarchal structures that govern so many of our social, professional, and interpersonal spheres . . . By following Febos’ distinct paths between the past and present, we might realize there’s room to forge our own, and that we’ve just been handed a flashlight that helps illuminate the way.

    NPR, "Books We Love"

  • The harrowing nature of transformation is Girlhood’s core subject, and in seven chapters Febos explores the interconnected aspects of patriarchy and the marks that they’ve left on her . . . The book’s centerpiece is a magisterial, seventy-six-page essay on what Febos terms ‘empty consent’—not merely agreeing to unwanted sex, but the ways in which women are programmed to collaborate in their own diminishment . . . Febos has some idea of how to break this cycle . . . She is also, perhaps, correcting the story of the girl-dreamer, whose elegy, it turns out, may have been premature—she lives to mother the woman.

    The New Yorker

  • I wish I could have read Girlhood when I was young . . . Over the course of eight essays with poignant illustrations by Forsyth Harmon, Febos interrogates the strength, savvy and vulnerabilities of girlhood . . . whether examining adolescent bullying and the etymological roots of the word ‘slut’ or exploring the evolution of consent against the backdrop of cuddle parties, Febos illuminates how women are conditioned to be complicit in our own exploitation. Like much of her scholarship, it begins with somatic knowledge of the self.

    The Washington Post, "Best of the Year"

  • In eight haunting essays, Melissa Febos unearths the trauma of her adolescence as she picks apart the burdens that accompany being a young woman. In sharing the darkness that clouded her coming of age, Febos asks pointed questions about the expectations placed on women and how they impact a person’s sense of self.

    Time, "Must-Read Books of the Year"

  • Febos is an intoxicating writer, but I found myself most grateful for the vivid clarity of her thinking . . . disquisitive and catalytic–it doesn’t demand change so much as expose certain injustices so starkly that you might feel you cannot abide them another minute . . . I never once needed trigonometry and I couldn’t find Catullus in a crossword these days, but Febos’ education is a kind I surely could have used.

    The Atlantic

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