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Abandon me : memoirs
2017
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Offers the author's personal narratives that focus on episodes of love and connection with family, lovers, and herself, while exploring ideas about art, love, and identity. - (Baker & Taylor)

"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 awayfor 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. "-- - (Baker & Taylor)

In her follow-up to Whip Smart, the former professional dominatrix fearlessly explores art, love and identity as she searches her childhood for resounding emotional truths about the bonds of family and the need for connections with other people. - (Baker & Taylor)

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. - (McMillan Palgrave)

Named One of the Best Books of 2017 by:
Esquire, Refinery29, LitHub, BookRiot, Medium, Electric Literature, The Brooklyn Rail, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, 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.

- (McMillan Palgrave)

Biografía del autor

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart. Her essays have appeared in Tin House, The Believer, The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, Lenny Letter, and elsewhere. Portions from Abandon Me have won prizes from Prairie Schooner, StoryQuarterly, and twice earned notice in the 2015 Best American Essays anthology. The recipient of fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Febos serves on the directorial board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and is an assistant professor of creative writing at Monmouth University. She lives in Brooklyn. melissafebos.com - (McMillan Palgrave)

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Booklist Reviews

Febos' (Whip Smart, 2010) second book is a collection of self-aware, stylish, autobiographical essays on love, addiction, and inheritance. Exploring her embarrassment over what she sees as her endless need for love, she touches on her Native American, Puerto Rican, and European heritages. She draws from her youth, growing up on Cape Cod with a veritable (and often absent) sea captain father, from her post-high-school-dropout days spent high on heroin, and from classical philosophy, psychology, mythology, and literature. In the longest essay in the collection, which shares the book's title and occupies more than half its pages with its 62 vignettes, she bonds with the Native American birth father to whom she'd always been contentedly disconnected while painfullly coming to terms with her relationship with a woman she loves obsessively. 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. Copyright 2016 Booklist Reviews.

Library Journal Reviews

After Whip Smart, a memoir about her experiences as a dominatrix, Febos returns with a close analysis of her own identity. The narrative jumps from past to present as the author explores her history, revisiting feelings of abandonment as her sea captain stepfather/adoptive father leaves for extended stretches of time. She also seeks to rekindle a relationship with her biological father, with whom her mother severed ties when Febos was two. She talks about her drug use, her brother's depression, and her American Indian heritage. In a long story arc, set against the backdrop of a long-distance romance, she meets and falls in love with a married woman, who later leaves her wife for Febos. Throughout the relationship, Febos details the feelings of euphoria and the excitement of new love, moving through the realization of what the relationship means to her. VERDICT This raw, brave work about truly knowing oneself will appeal to those interested in gender and women's studies, origin stories, and LGBTQ narratives.—Rachael Dreyer, Pennsylvania State Univ. Dept. of Libs. (c) Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Tabla de contenido

The Book of Hours
1(19)
Leave Marks
20(12)
Call My Name
32(15)
Labyrinths
47(33)
All of Me
80(12)
Wunderkammer
92(15)
Girl at a Window
107(24)
Abandon Me
131

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