Abandon Me: Memoirs

Abandon Me: Memoirs - Paperback

$18.00
$18.00
Skip to product information
Abandon Me: Memoirs
  • Abandon Me: Memoirs
Abandon Me: Memoirs - Paperback

Abandon Me: Memoirs - Paperback

by Melissa Febos
$18.00
$18.00

Book Overview

Named One of the Best Books of the year by:
Esquire, Refinery29, BookRiot, Medium, Electric Literature, The Brooklyn Rail, Largehearted Boy, The Coil and The Cut.

Winner of the Lambda Literary Jeanne Cordova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction
Finalist, Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography
Finalist, Publishing Triangle's Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
An Indie Next Pick

For readers of Maggie Nelson and Leslie Jamison, a fierce and dazzling personal narrative that explores the many ways identity and art are shaped by love and loss.

In her critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart, Melissa Febos laid bare the intimate world of the professional dominatrix, turning an honest examination of her life into a lyrical study of power, desire, and fulfillment.

In her dazzling Abandon Me, Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection -- with family, lovers, and oneself. First, her birth father, who left her with only an inheritance of addiction and Native American blood, its meaning a mystery. As Febos tentatively reconnects, she sees how both these lineages manifest in her own life, marked by compulsion and an instinct for self-erasure. Meanwhile, she remains closely tied to the sea captain who raised her, his parenting ardent but intermittent as his work took him away for months at a time. Woven throughout is the hypnotic story of an all-consuming, long-distance love affair with a woman, marked equally by worship and withdrawal. In visceral, erotic prose, Febos captures their mutual abandonment to passion and obsession -- and the terror and exhilaration of losing herself in another.

At once a fearlessly vulnerable memoir and an incisive investigation of art, love, and identity, Abandon Me draws on childhood stories, religion, psychology, mythology, popular culture, and the intimacies of one writer's life to reveal intellectual and emotional truths that feel startlingly universal.
ISBN9781632866585
Author Melissa Febos
PublisherBloomsbury USA
GenreBiography
FormatPaperback
PublishedFebruary 2018
LanguageENG- English
Pages336
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Biography & Autobiography Nonfiction

1% fer Each of the Seven Seas

Every purchase sends 7% of our profits to The Ocean Cleanup. No fine print, no opt-in — just how we sail.

Whoever Ye Be, Welcome Aboard

Queer lit, music, art, philosophy, fiction — stories for every kind of soul. Come as ye are, matey.

More by Melissa Febos

Abandon Me: Memoirs

Abandon Me: Memoirs - Paperback

Abandon Me: Memoirs - Paperback

By Melissa Febos

About Melissa Febos

MELISSA FEBOS is the national bestselling author of four books, including Girlhood--which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. She has been awarded prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, LAMBDA Literary, the National Endowment for the Arts, the British Library, the Black Mountain Institute, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Best American Essays, Vogue, The Sewanee Review, New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Febos is a full professor at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly.

You may also like