With each new piece Febos bends time. As she explores her past, recalling her brother’s struggles with mental health or her family’s trip to Egypt to visit her sea-captain father, she builds on the story of her fraying relationship with Amaia, with each essay serving as a foundation for the next ... For me, some of her most resonant passages come in the first essay, 'The Book of Hours.' Shifting through different parts of her life, Febos describes the shelter she has always taken in stories ... No subject is off-limits to Febos. She authorizes her reader to be braver, to dig deeper into their own secrets and to research those secrets in history. It is the act of keeping secrets that is dangerous, not the act of telling them. Confession is freedom. In combining research with her narrative, Febos is staking claim to her own existence.
The essays leap back and forth in time, overlapping to create a Venn diagram that gradually reveals a complete picture. At the point where the essays meet sits Febos herself, a woman willing to confront challenging questions about her life with openness and honesty ... What is most striking about this collection is Febos’ ability to hold many moments of her own life in conversation ... Febos’ writing is unflinching, and her willingness to delve into her darkest corners avoids becoming overwhelming only because she handles it with strength and delicacy. Abandon Me finds the universal in her own story and taps into many people’s fears, pushing the reader to question what they might abandon themselves to or let themselves abandon.
Febos invites readers to examine the contents of her life. Alcoholism, drug addiction, desire, dependency, she fearlessly lays them out before us and probes them with the analytic eye of a diagnostician. And nothing does she dissect more painstakingly nor with more honesty than love ... This technique of braiding together disparate stories with other material is one Febos employs throughout, but not always successfully...in places, her detours are distracting and the thread wending its way back to her principal narrative doesn’t hold ... That said, Abandon Me has much to recommend it: candor, a tone blessedly free of self-pity, and, for all those who ever flipped over the shiny side of love’s bright coin and discovered dross, hope.
Somewhere in this dramatis personae there’s an interesting story, even a compelling one, given how it crisscrosses so many ethnic and social lines of American history. Febos is a talented writer with a colorful personal history, but her short scenes and forced juxtapositions leave readers yearning for more connections and continuity. Why does Febos feel as she does? Poetic technique, allusions and cultural references can’t bolster rather ordinary experiences: loneliness, bad romances, throwing up ... Febos’s best writing is unmediated: 'My story did not include regret until thirty-two,' she writes, when 'I came to truly know my own fear.' Or, describing the moment when she meets her birth father: 'My stomach clenched. Like a hovering wasp, his nearness made my shoulder smart.' Here are real, lived experiences, and we gobble them up.Abandon Me is a step up from the lurid Whip Smart, because Febos links her self-investigation to larger adult concerns of family obligations and healthy loving. But her 'bad girl' image still prevails.
The visceral beauty of such scenes is matched in evocations of the sheltered Cape Cod where she grew up, its shores, lake and woodlands replete with childhood tests and dangers. Fairy tales are ribboned into the essays, as well as myth, philosophy, Jung, Rilke and pop culture mirrors such as Freaks and Geeks — and much more. Though initially rewarding, by book’s end intertextuality and digression begin to cluster and fuse like a lattice, screening Febos’ stunning gifts for metaphor and raw emotional truths. Arguably, the more compact essays carry greater power.
In many ways, Abandon Me echoes Leslie Jamison’s essay collection, The Empathy Exams. Febos meditates over the concept of abandonment quite like Jamison meditates on the idea of empathy ... Febos sketches in staggering detail her adolescent of abandonment: her biological father leaving her mother, and then her stepdad disappearing for months at time for his job ... The true strength of the collection is in the titular memoir, which takes up half of the book. If it was done any other way, it would have seemed tedious and scattered. Instead, it feels more like we are wandering through a period of Febos’s life when she was lost. The memoir is the map.
Some of the most enjoyable parts of Abandon Me come when Febos explores her histories, weaving in tidbits like the popularity among Nantucket sea wives of the ?‘he’s-at-home,’ an early ceramic dildo' ... Less successful are the sections given over to Febos’s obsessive affair with a married woman named Amaia. As she recounts Amaia’s increasingly possessive behavior, we feel her pain but don’t see more than the familiar outlines of someone who loves a person she knows is bad for her, tries and repeatedly fails to leave before she finally does. Her digressions into texts ranging from Homer and Jung to Peter Jackson’s early film Heavenly Creatures are often fascinating, but they come to feel like attempts to make the affair stand in for more than what it wants to be, or to provide relief from its ultimate hollowness.
I devoured these pages. Curled up on my coral-colored couch, I sometimes looked up as if someone might catch me in the act of crawling into her mind and living there for a while. It felt like I was being folded into her prose ... Abandon Me doesn’t have graphic, shocking scenes like Febos’s first, instead she goes further into the messy vulnerable, human parts of herself ... I’m comforted that Febos found the courage to do so. It makes me feel understood. And in a small way, I’m emboldened by it.
It’s easy to fall in love with Melissa Febos’ gorgeous new memoir of short essays, Abandon Me. Over the course of the eight pieces contained within, Febos brings a relentless curiosity and startling intimacy to the page ... Abandon Me is brutal both in its honest portrayal of human need and of the things we do for love, for recognition, for safety ... Abandon Me is a fierce exploration of love and obsession, but it is something else as well—the story of woman who is unafraid to explore the harsh truths and choices that shape our lives.
Febos is concerned with how life shapes and is shaped by art. But here it frequently feels terribly adolescent, and often like Febos is spinning her tales from behind one mask, then another ... [the] final essay is of a higher caliber than most of the others, which end up feeling like preparatory sketches that were probably more useful to Febos than they are to us. I wish I had read the last one first, because by the time I got to it I was weary of hearing about her beloved, and about Febos’s bad-girl days — her heroin use, for example. Like many reformed addicts, she savors the details of the sordidness she’s left behind ... In a couple of spots — most notably an essay about her brother, whom she seems to love unreservedly, and a grateful passage about the Captain — Febos is utterly believable, her words full-hearted and not just for show. But mostly, these pages teem with bravado.
Much like the relationship between one’s expectations of life and lived reality, Abandon Me is an assemblage of parts that resist both linear description and codification. It’s comprised of lyric essays as intellectually sophisticated as they are emotionally stirring; a series of unflinching reflections and honest accounts of transformation that Febos refuses to let pass without scrutiny ... Throughout, Febos complicates the human desire for connection with explorations in philosophy, psychology, and accounts of historical repression that seduce readers into inhabiting her myths while resisting sentimentality by dismantling the fictions with deft intellectual probing reminiscent of the work of Maggie Nelson ... One of Febos’s greatest literary strengths is her ability to make these intimate experiences feel universal. As readers, we feel our failings and insecurities acknowledged with each of her admissions: the piercing honesty of her prose, the self-effacing exploration of being both the abandoned and the abandoner, the loved and the unloved, 'the conquered and the conqueror.'”
Melissa Febos knows something about the secret threads binding pleasure and pain, the heliotropic pull of the light and the hypnotic tug of darkness ... Abandon Me pivots back and forth between Febos’s feverish love and her discovery of her birth family, threading the two narratives together like a double helix ... Perhaps the most striking achievement of this memoir is Febos’s treatment of the alchemy of pain. To seek pain is not evidence of an instinct for self-destruction.
Finishing the book felt like lying in bed after sex with a new lover, hoping arms would close around me but not wanting to ask for it ... Febos’s past heroin use, her birth father’s alcoholism, and the other addictions that manifest throughout Abandon Me are devastating and lyrical, but nothing compares to her 'wrecking shore' of a love affair. This part of the book, which I can only critique by lamenting that it was not long enough, is as difficult to leave as a toxic relationship. As suffocating as a gaslight.
[In this] collection of self-aware, stylish, autobiographical essays on love, addiction, and inheritance, Febos harnesses language, moods, actions, and settings with precision. A professor of creative writing, she stuns with sentences that are a credit to her craft and will no doubt inspire her readers.
Erotic and dark, the book is a courageous exploration of love as the ultimate form of plenitude and annihilation. A lyrically visceral memoir of love and loss.
Febos is concerned with how life shapes and is shaped by art. But here it frequently feels terribly adolescent, and often like Febos is spinning her tales from behind one mask, then another ... [the] final essay is of a higher caliber than most of the others, which end up feeling like preparatory sketches that were probably more useful to Febos than they are to us. I wish I had read the last one first, because by the time I got to it I was weary of hearing about her beloved, and about Febos’s bad-girl days — her heroin use, for example. Like many reformed addicts, she savors the details of the sordidness she’s left behind ... In a couple of spots — most notably an essay about her brother, whom she seems to love unreservedly, and a grateful passage about the Captain — Febos is utterly believable, her words full-hearted and not just for show. But mostly, these pages teem with bravado.
