Jan 10, 2026 Literary

Body Work, Melissa Febos

Thanks Nano Banana for illustrating my reading spot.

The second part of Body Work's title is "The Radical Power of Personal Narrative" and that was all I needed to know. Download!

There is no pain in my life that has not been given value by the alchemy of creative attention.

I discovered Melissa Febos through her latest memoir The Dry Season, which was a favorite last year. She's one of those writers I immediately want to read more from, and also become best friend with.

Writing is a form of freedom more accessible than many and there are forces at work that would like to withhold it from those whose stories most threaten the regimes that govern this society. Fuck them. Write your life. Let this book be a totem of permission, encouragement, proof, whatever you need it to be.

It's called a craft book by some, but I think it's more philosophical. Fabos is sharing both from personal experience and research what it means to share your story. How it can change you, and how it can change others.

I want to feel on the page how the writer changed. How the act of writing changed them.

It's a niche reading experience. Interesting if you are drawn to the art of writing personal narrative, probably utterly boring if you're not.

As Robert Gibbs explains in his book Why Ethics?: “Returning is learning to know yourself again, to find your own agency in the actions that you have committed.” Replace the word returning with writing, and you have a sentence that could confidently be uttered by anyone who has authored a memoir. “Writing is learning to know yourself again, to find your own agency in the actions that you have committed.”