Body Work
A fierce exploration of memoir’s power—Melissa Febos shows how personal narrative transforms shame, truth, and intimacy into tools of liberation.
All summaries are written by me—the human. AI lends a hand only with spelling and grammar, which I’ve yet to master (and likely never will). My aim is to stay neutral, carrying the author’s style and keeping as much of their essence as I can.
1 - In Praise of Navel Gazing
“But I don’t want to seem self-absorbed. You know, navel-gazing.” These are the words of a student from Febos’s non-fiction writing workshop when asked to include more of herself. A room largely of women nods in understanding—they get it. They feel it. This scene has played out plenty of times before.
We are artists, intellectuals—this isn’t therapy or sharing your diary out, AS IF one could just concoct it out of their journals and off you go. No. As Febos comments: “I’m finished referring, in a derogatory way, to stories of body and sex and gender and violence and joy and childhood and family as navel-gazing.”
A couple of years prior, during a writers’ conference, a female audience member asked about the potential readership for a memoir about surviving family trauma. One of the male panel editors rolled his eyes and said: “I mean, I’m not sure we need any more of those stories.” Later that day, when Febos asked the audience who had experienced any act of violence, abuse, harassment, or humiliation, the room fell silent, then the air filled with raised hands.
During university, the sentiment toward memoir as an unworthy form of literature was shared among Febos and her peers. For this very reason, when during a class on memoir her professor told her to stop everything else she was doing in order to write one, she was shocked and cringed. Who would want to read the tales of a 26-year-old former sex worker and junkie?
As Febos shares, once she did end up writing one, she didn’t do it for herself—though that helped—she did it for others. For those who could relate, and perhaps for those who could not, but might come to understand.
In the 1980s, social psychologist James W. Pennebaker demonstrated how fifteen minutes of expressive writing could strengthen the immune system, decrease obsessive thinking—and it only took four days.
The prejudice against writing memoir is also a sexist mechanism, rooted in a false binary where the emotional is deemed female and the intellectual male. Consider readership: most fiction is read by women, and most non-fiction by men. The divide still stands tall.
What we often forget is that personal narratives have the power to change social norms and instigate change. Consider Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History, where Canadian First Nation women tell their own stories in contrast to the “objective” colonial history books written by the “winners.” In doing so, they offer a fuller record of history and change the narrative.
If you are familiar with the history of hysteria, you know it was considered a mysterious illness affecting mostly women, which male physicians attempted to cure with masturbation, water treatments, and even institutionalisation. Eventually, it came to be recognised as a trauma-induced response, and thus psychotherapy began.
Freud wrote a paper concluding that at the core of hysteria lay premature early childhood sexual experiences: abuse, assault, and incest. Unfortunately, he retired the paper a year later—because if we were to accept these conclusions, we would also have to accept that the upper classes were rampant with predators and abusers. That could not be allowed. Freud chose to save his reputation over the truth.
It was only in the 1970s, with the rise of feminist groups, that battered women’s shelters and rape crisis centres became available. Similarly, when Vietnam War veterans returned and formed groups to share their stories, public and governmental support was granted far more swiftly to the men—along with psychological studies, and PTSD was officially recognised as a mental disorder.
As Febos writes: “Social justice has always depended upon the testimonies of the oppressed.”
You won’t hear perpetrators admitting to wrongdoing—if someone doesn’t come knocking on the door, that door won’t open itself.
We cannot fully acknowledge the history and experience of a group unless THEY are able to tell their story. Febos argues that resistance to memoir is ultimately a thinly veiled resistance to social justice.
Writing a memoir is not writing a diary. To the people who seemed surprised and would exclaim, ‘The writing! It was so good’—it is no happy accident. Writing a memoir is not any easier than any other kind of writing.
As Febos writes: “The risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery. To place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent, broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you.”
The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey recently found that 13.1 percent of lesbians, 46.1 percent of bisexual women, and 17.4 percent of heterosexual women have been raped, physically assaulted, or stalked. According to RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), Indigenous women are twice as likely to experience sexual assault as any other race.
Feminist these days is a bad word. It’s been hijacked, turned into a slur, a mockery—even when choosing this book I could see a few eyes roll. As Febos best puts it: ‘As a lifelong feminist who prefers sex and partnerships with women, I have been insisting for my entire life that I’m not an angry man-hating lesbian.”
“Men write about their daddy issues incessantly and I don’t see anyone accusing them of navel-gazing.” And why do stories of women and people of colour feel as though they belong only to that select group, while white male authors are considered universal? They are the default. “White masculinity is for everyone, while media that features anyone of any other kind of identity cannot be expected to have an audience beyond those who share that identity.”
2 - Mind Fuck: Writing Better Sex
A writing workshop begins with “write your sexual life story in five sentences.” The students do so. Febos immediately asks them to rinse and repeat. They do, and once more, they are asked to rinse and repeat. Frustrated, confused, they carry on four times. The point is this: you’ll always find a way to see things differently. The polished, window-shopping version will alter, and maybe something beneath the surface emerges—maybe that’s closer to the truth.
Febos shares how her whole life she’s been prescribed narratives about her body: how it should or should not be, what its value is, how it should and should not behave—“and what I have learned is how my body is mostly good for sex and that sex should mostly be good for men.”
As Nancy Mairs states: “In sex, as in the rest of my life, I am acted upon. I am the object, not the agent.”
After Febos’s book on her experience as a dominatrix was published, during a Q&A a woman asked her if she was ashamed, to which she answered no. A fuller answer, in the words of Nancy Mairs, however, would have been:
“Shamelessness, like shame, is not a masculine condition. That is, there is no shameless man as there is a shameless woman or, as my grandmother used to say, a shameless hussy. A man without shame is in general assumed to simply have done nothing he need feel guilty about. A woman without shame is a strumpet, a trollop, a whore, a witch. The connotations have been, immemorially, sexual… My sexuality has been the single most powerful disruptive force mankind has ever perceived, and its repression has been the work of centuries.”
When writing her second book Whip Smart, Febos realised how the portrayal of the main character and the sexual intimacy felt like telling the story she had told herself—not the story of what had actually happened.
Sontag claims that “pornography is a theater of types, never of individuals.” We are never isolated in our intimacy—this intimacy doesn’t belong to us; it was given, sometimes shoved at us.
When art is not honest however, it is boring. But when we use art to tell the stories we have been conditioned to tell, that’s even more boring. “The more we believe we ought to be something that we are not, the more money we will spend in that mission.”
Those who benefit from a dominant structure have an interest in reinforcing it, and therefore we iterate and reiterate ad nauseam.
Febos shares how the porn she watches and is conditioned to engage with is an enactment of the ideas she’s been fed since childhood—about women’s value as sexual objects and their submission to men, for men’s sexual pleasure. It does the trick, it gets the job done, but as soon as the peak is over, all you are left with is a bitter taste in your mouth; you are left frightened and sad.
“I’m only interested in joining the theater of types designed to brainwash and oppress me as a momentary actor; I don’t want to hang out there as myself.”
Why not watch porn that mimics the predilections one has, Febos asks? Perhaps because porn is incapable of producing anything beyond triggering the scripts within us—which require no trigger for arousal. Consider this against depicting the mechanics of intimacy and connection on a video screen, mission impossible.
“The female characters in works of fiction by a writer who has violated women are often two-dimensional objects of obsession, possession, derision, or worship—all violable statuses.” Febos adds: “Or perhaps the men are all presented as inclined to violate. In other words, the author’s imagination frequently fails to transcend his own personal limitations.”
We must also discern the difference between sex and sexual violence, as so often we are presented with examples of sexual violence as sex. Not to speak of how often women are depicted only as two-dimensional characters, mere props in the male hero’s journey. They are just bodies.
How to write better sex
Use any words you want. There are no bad words, no unsexy words. We have so much exiled sex in our minds that we can only touch it at a distance and with gloves. Throw them off, say your truth.
“But after kissing her mouth a little chapped which seemed familiar then feeling her breasts not so large, but nice round and beautiful, familiar breasts, ones I already knew in some way I tugged down her pants. She said Oh. Like a soft amount of light, a small gust of wind. And luckily she had some sweatpants on or something, a stretchy waist. Easy getting them down and there were her lemony legs. Not big not strong, but smooth soft hair like peaches everything that way. Pink rose warm. I just dived down. It couldn’t have been too fast. Time was being so slow and warm. And there it was. A pussy, the singular place on a girl, it’s where I’m going. Wiggly thing, like soup, like a bowl. Another mouth. Like lips between her legs and the taste of it. Piss and fruit. I pressed my face against its bone and it moved. She was letting me. All this was happening. I smelled the future right there, a present and a past. All that went through her, known through the soft sweet flesh of her lips and clit. It was like my face felt loved temporarily […] I felt plunged into a tropical movie in which light was bathing my head and her pussy, her cunt, her crotch was a warm smile and for a moment I lived in her sun.”
Eileen Myles —Inferno
Here the usual words for sexual depiction are used, and yet, while they are usually ingrained with the pornographic theatre, the disgust, the violence, the degradation—in the writing they are washed, cleansed through a barer, truer innocence.
Sex also doesn’t have to be good or about pleasure. Sex can often be boring, awkward, offensive, sad, and speak instead of connection, apathy, or even grief:
“I did not deny. I did not get angry. I didn’t bargain, become depressed, or accept. I fucked. I sucked. Not my husband, but people I hardly knew, and in that I found a glimmer of relief. The people I messed around with did not have names; they had titles: the Prematurely Graying Wilderness Guide, the Technically Still a Virgin Mexican Teenager, the Formerly Gay Organic Farmer, the Quietly Perverse Poet, the Failing but Still Trying Massage Therapist, the Terribly Large Texas Bull Rider, the Recently Unemployed Graduate of Juilliard, the Actually Pretty Famous Drummer Guy. Most of these people were men; some were women. With them, I was not in mourning; I wasn’t even me. I was happy and sexy and impetuous and fun…”
Cheryl Strayed’s —“The Love of My Life,”
Notice how powerful this line is: “With them, I was not in mourning; I wasn’t even me.” Sex thus become a vehicle for transformation, escapism, to feel more or to feel less — to feel something different.
Sex is what sex is for you
Febos describes a time when she rubbed balloons all over a man for seventy-five dollars. He’d call it sex, she’d call it work—either way, they were both right.
Whether you are fully clothed or naked, alone or in a group, whether your hands or your groin are the actors—it is all sex. Don’t treat intercourse as the main meal; dive into the full buffet.
“In the world of your writing, no sex is a punchline unless you make it one. There is no marginal erotic unless you sideline it.”
3 - Big Shitty Party
Febos shares guidance on how to let the writer win while narrating personal anecdotes—you might cringe at the thought of your mother, colleagues, or friends reading about your experiences, but the writer ultimately has the final voice. It is their voice that is victorious, seeking truth, and this requires relentless self-awareness, courage, and compassion.
It’s also worth considering that sharing one’s truth is still only the truth of one individual, leaving no space for the other person to respond and speak theirs. This raises questions about the ethics of telling such a story, as it leaves one party silent, unable to reply. And further—of what truth are we speaking here? Objective, subjective, or something in between?
4 - The Return
The word confessions, originally in Latin, means “to acknowledge”—guilt and repentance were later additions.
In the Mishneh Torah, the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides speaks about the process of repentance. He outlines three steps: to stop the action, to change in relation to the past, and the act of confessing. To begin repentance, we must turn inward and undergo a change of heart.
Often such changes are not loudly announced—they arrive as a subtle knock, almost imperceptible. Natasha Trethewey writes in her memoir Memorial Drive about her mother’s killing by an abusive ex-husband. With no conscious intention of confronting the past, sixteen years later she finds herself buying a house just a few miles from the crime scene. A confrontation becomes inevitable: “All those years I thought that I had been running away from my past I had, in fact, been working my way steadily back to it.”
All forms of trauma share the quality of disempowerment, and until one regains some agency, no work can begin. Peter Levine, who first developed somatic experiencing, describes it as the body’s desire to become whole again, as if a part of us has been lost or fragmented.
Dissociation often works as a powerful mechanism, rendering us numb to certain experiences.
Hermann Cohen writes of confession as the process of “re-cognising” that the confessor is the maker of his own guilt. Only through reflection can agency be reclaimed and complicity understood.
Robert Gibbs, in Why Ethics?, adds: “Returning is learning to know yourself again, to find your own agency in the actions that you have committed.” This is not so different from the AA program, where the newly sober are asked to reflect on their own self-righteousness.
“Confessing makes me know myself,” writes Gibbs. “Knowing myself is an act of transforming myself.”
In the process of writing, “You make the past known in order to know yourself as changed.” It is not just transformation we are seeking, but acceptance.
Febos recalls a memory of giving a press interview where she crudely told the interviewer that as a teenager she was busy being “fingered-banged behind the mall.” Writing these words now, she cringes, recognising that her answer was merely a tool to appear tough and uncaring compared to the reality of what actually happened. As she describes:
“Her own desire combined with social conditioning made it impossible to deflect or refuse every sexual petition. She did not enjoy being finger-banged behind the mall. She had only wanted to be kissed. She had followed the call of her own desire and unknowingly entered into a contract that promised more than she wanted to give.”
The key part to notice here is, once again, the social conditioning that acts as an agent of its own—transforming Febos’s body into an object of fulfilment, rather than the body of a 12-year-old girl who simply wanted to be kissed.
George Santayana writes: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Franz Rosenzweig, another Jewish philosopher, adds: “The soul speaks, I have sinned, and does away with shame. In so speaking purely back into the past, it cleanses the present from the weakness of the past.”
Febos, perhaps more than most, has done this with courage and relentless pursuit of her own truth—rejecting shame and the vilification of a society all too eager to condemn. If you don’t call that a form of bravery, I don’t know what bravery is.
Ultimately, the confessor who confesses to themselves is also confessing to others—the witnesses who feast on their bravery and are moved, even transformed, by it.
Further Analysis
This book treads into difficult terrain, raising themes that unsettle and provoke. Perhaps you felt shaken by a truth you would rather avoid, or bristled at a passage you disagreed with. Often, our discomfort is the surest signal of what lies unresolved within us.
Victims and Perpetrators
The first chapter lays bare the politics and social dynamics of trauma stories. At their core, such stories name a victim and a perpetrator. And with that naming comes conflict. It is impossible to tell them otherwise. Yet perhaps the question is this: can we hold these narratives with compassion? Can we bear the discomfort without mistaking it for a personal attack?
Sex as a Vehicle
Sex—one word, endlessly repeated, yet reframed here in startling ways: as intimacy, as escapism, as grief, loneliness, or a means of survival. Contrast this with the media’s pre-packaged fantasy: two lovers merging in perfect synchronicity, climaxing in a neatly staged happy ending.
Febos confesses, “and what I have learned is how my body is mostly good for sex and that sex should mostly be good for men.” Women are often staged as vessels of desire, yet the desire is never theirs; it is men who are meant to consume and benefit. Should we be content with this representation? And if not, what damage does such a narrative inflict?
Porn as a Tutor
Though Febos only brushes against it, pornography is impossible to ignore—a male-gazed spectacle masquerading as intimacy. But let’s not soften it: porn is not sex, nor is it intimacy. It is simply porn. As Susan Sontag observes, “pornography is a theater of types, never of individuals.” Porn reduces, repeats, and performs. It is a simulacrum that feeds on us as much as we feed on it, a parasite with its own tenacity to endure.
So we must ask: are we willing to let these theatrics—these unchosen narratives—shape our collective imagination and desires? Consider this: in the UK, a survey by the Children’s Commissioner found the average age at which children first encounter pornography is 13. Other studies echo this figure, some estimating that more than half of adolescents regularly consume it. What does it mean for a society when the grammar of desire is taught by pornography?
Sexual Trauma
Febos also confronts sexual trauma with unflinching honesty. Here, I would add a reflection of my own: survivors often turn to hypersexual behaviour as a way to reclaim control, rewriting the script from “sex was done to me” to “I choose sex, I own it.” It is a compelling narrative, easy to believe in. But consider the cost: what if the porn industry is filled with those coping with trauma in this way? A bitter pill to swallow, yet one we cannot ignore.
The data is indeed stark. In a 2025 Swedish study by Meghan Donevan, among those who had filmed pornography, 88% reported childhood sexual abuse, 90% psychological abuse, and 79% physical abuse.
And yet sex workers are scorned, shamed, and ridiculed. But are they not the victims? And if we consume the product—are we not, in some way, the perpetrators?
Personal Truth
To speak your personal truth requires courage. In the words of Febos: “The risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery. To place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent, broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you.” What it also asks of us is a reflection on truth: how often have we perceived or felt an event so differently from someone else? This does not invalidate anyone’s story, yet it paints a more complex and nuanced image—one where multiple truths coexist, demanding deeper compassion and awareness.
Thoughts for Discussion
You are invited to share your thoughts — after all, what better way to gain clarity of our own ideas and those of others than through discourse?
Do you feel there is a benefit in reading the stories of other people’s trauma?
And is it helpful to read stories that reflect your own traumas/experience?
Is writing about the self an act of bravery, or an act of indulgence? Can it be both?
Did this book reinforce or challenge any of your assumptions about the world?
If confronting discomfort is a doorway to growth, what truths/ or section in this book made you most uneasy?
Can sex ever escape the scripts society imposes on it, or are we always performing someone else’s narrative?
Does shame silence us, or does silence create shame?
If trauma stories require both victim and perpetrator, what responsibility do we carry as listeners or readers?
What is our moral obligation towards the people in our own stories?
Have you ever used writing - journaling, poetry, short fiction, etc - to help you through a difficult emotional time? Did you find it helpful?
This book prompted me to consider how difficult it can be for people to sit with and hold space for the truth of another person's trauma, when they have no comparable basis to relate to it. I'm thinking of the panel editor in the first chapter that the author quotes as saying, "I'm not sure we need any more of those stories." The key take away for me was, this editor was unable to personally relate to the woman in question, which resulted in his defensive and dismissive reaction. The book highlighted for me that this is an uncomfortable and unfortunate challenge about the human experience and how we relate to each other.
However upon awareness of this, there is I think, in such situations, an opportunity first for humility on part of the reader or listener. And second for the recognition that we don't need to fully understand someone's experience for it to be true for them, and therefore, for it to warrant our compassion and consideration. Can we set aside ego, and exercise curiosity and care, rather than pursuing the futile effort to determine some ultimate right perspective?
Truth in experience is always personal and subjective, and still, those truths of a traumatic nature always deserve care and compassion first and foremost. We can also orient ourselves towards those of a similar demographic to the storyteller, if those stories resonate, that's a sure sign they warrant our careful consideration. Indeed finding stories like our own, reading them and feeling our experience reflected back at us, can ultimately be an extremely healing experience.
I think Febos managed to navigate all of this nuance very effectively throughout the book.
I enjoyed speaking about this book with my group. I think all of us expressed a pre-existing prejudice against memoirs in general, having mostly dismissed them as self-indulgent and self-promoting. I also have an aversion to reading personal accounts that must by necessity be from an unreliable narrator.
However, I think Febos made a very strong argument for why personal narratives are important, how they can be healing for both the author and the reader, and require an immense amount of bravery to write honestly and responsibly.
I also appreciated Febos' examples of sex scenes that advance our understanding of the character and what that sex means to them in that moment. I am not a fan of gratuitous sex in books or film, that only exists to entice viewer-/reader-ship, and assumes that there is no further meaning to that sex.
Thank you to the members of my group for an informative, enjoyable, and respectful discussion.