Hi friend,
First off, I’m excited to announce our next book club pick. It’s Girlhood by Melissa Febos—a gorgeous collection of essays that interrogates what women are told about what it means to be a woman, and what it takes to free ourselves from those strictures. It has me reflecting on my own girlhood—and the moment I stepped into it.
I remember it clearly—I often said to my parents, “This is the best year of my life, and I’m pretty sure it’s always going to be the best year of my life.” I was eight, and we were living in La Marsa, Tunisia, right on the beach, and there was an infinite number of stray cats and dogs. (There’s always been a direct correlation between my happiness level and the number of strays.) I was always bottle-feeding some newborn kitten, and I was discovering my own individuality through painting, playing music, and reading.
In my bedroom, there was a window where I could sit, sized perfectly for my little body, and it was in that niche that I discovered my passion for reading. One of the books I read obsessively was Harriet the Spy. After the first read, I started asking my mother to make tomato sandwiches, then started a spy club with all the girls in my class. The whole thing escalated when the boys started a rival spy club, and one day launched a scorpion in the middle of the girls’ spy club meeting. Did I mention that was also the year I developed a fascination with boys?
There is so much strangeness at that age. In some ways, I became very self-conscious, of things like my bottle-thick glasses. At times I felt so conspicuous that I would pull all of my hair in front of my face like a curtain. But that was also the year that my teacher, Mrs. Ayari, told my parents that I was smart, which felt like a revelation. It was such a paradox, to be horrified by the discovery of self, but also to feel empowered by it.
In addition to reading Girlhood with you, I’m honored to be hosting Melissa Febos for our next Studio Visit on May 23. When I think of Melissa, the first word that comes to mind is brave, which is not a word I use lightly. She writes about the parts of the human experience that most of us feel a reflexive inclination to conceal, and she doesn’t just unveil those things—she holds them up to the light and examines them in a way that allows us to see ourselves more clearly. She’s also one of the best humans and the best writing teachers I’ve ever known.
Today we’re revisiting her prompt—about the books that formed us.
Craving tomato sandwiches,
Suleika
P.S. If you become a paid subscriber before May 8, you’ll get access to the Studio Visit with Melissa Febos, as well as the Hatch, our virtual writing hour. Each month, we gather for a few words for inspiration, then write together in silence. It never ceases to amaze me how moving it is, how warm and friendly and connected. I hope you’ll join us!
Books of My Youth by Melissa Febos
I almost always begin a writing day by reading. Sometimes that is enough. There is the list of books I love, and then there is the much shorter list of books that turn over my creative engine in an instant—I think most writers probably have both categories. For me it is nonfiction that blows the roof off of what I think my work needs to be—something unexpected, something that defies convention, or at least the conventions of my own creative thinking when anxiety gets in there. Some reliable jumpstarters for me are Jeannette Winterson, Zadie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Renee Gladman, and Roland Barthes.
Lately, I’ve also been returning to the texts of my childhood—probably for the added element of comfort, but also because the images and plots and worlds of those works were the formative ones for my own imagination and informed the fundamental way that I relate to image and plot and world-making.
Your prompt for today:
Make a short list of texts from your past, even better if you can select particular passages or moments that meant something to you. Without necessarily revisiting the book (you can do that later), start writing about your relationship to it, in narrative terms. When did you read it? What was your life at the time? Write a scene of your reading it, replete with all the ways it made you feel. Then, consider why you needed it at that particular time. Follow it from there—feeling free to depart from the text.
If I were to make such a list for Abandon Me, I would choose (I did choose): The Story of Ferdinand, the films Labyrinth and Heavenly Creatures, The Chronicles of Narnia, D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths, and Rilke’s Book of Hours.
Most recently I did this with Jack London’s White Fang, and the scene I used ended up getting cut from the essay, which is a thirty-page ode to my hands. You really never know what is going to find its way to the surface if you create an opening.