Harvard Book Store Virtual Event: Melissa Febo

Harvard Book Store’s virtual event series welcomes MELISSA FEBOS—author of the acclaimed memoirs Whip Smart and Abandon Me—for a discussion of her latest, highly anticipated book, Girlhood. She will be joined in conversation by ZZ PACKER, author of the beloved story collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.

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While payment is not required, we are suggesting a $5 contribution to support this author series, our staff, and the future of Harvard Book Store—a locally owned, independently run Cambridge institution. In addition, by purchasing a copy of Girlhood on harvard.com, you support indie bookselling and the writing community during this difficult time.

About Girlhood

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.

Praise for Girlhood

“Girlhood is an exquisite collection. In lapidary, lucid prose, Melissa Febos dissects the traumas, terrors, and pleasures of the fraught passage from girl to woman. Febos’s insight is devastating, the examinations of her world—from the female body, queerness, consent, slut-shaming, and intimacy—are rigorous and compassionate. This is a book for mothers, daughters, and our deepest selves, a true light in the dark.” —Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter

“In this book, Febos proves herself to be one of the great documenters of the terrible and exquisite depths of girlhood. Here, that terrible and beautiful aeon is dissected, sung over, explored like ancient ruins. These essays are moss and iron-hard and beautiful-and struck through with Febos’ signature brilliance and power and grace. An essential, heartbreaking project.” —Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House and Her Body and Other Parties

“Melissa Febos is part poet, part theorist, and all writer. In this lyrical, searching, profound, and personal collection, Febos examines childhood, femaleness, and love in its many forms with a sensuous ferocity that is all her own.” —Ariel Levy, author of The Rules Do Not Apply and Female Chauvinist Pigs