Girlhood

For readers of Maggie Nelson and Leslie Jamison, a fierce and breathtaking set of meditations on female sexuality for the #MeToo generation.

In her dazzling new collection, Melissa Febos captures the ordeals, achievements, and setbacks women face from girlhood into adulthood. Febos was eleven when her body began to change, and almost overnight, the way people spoke to, looked at, and treated her changed with it. As she grew, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong.

A quarter century later, in her mid-thirties, Febos experienced a time of reckoning, when she decided to confront and change some of the behaviors and beliefs that she’d been carrying since adolescence-about the female body, what love was, and what it meant to care for herself. Her rise to self-revelation paralleled the country’s, as the #metoo movement began the process of reckoning with what it means to grow up female in a patriarchal culture.

In visceral, fearless essays that combine memoir, lyricism, investigative reporting, and scholarship, Febos draws a portrait of the forces that shaped her, and of an America where women are rarely free to define themselves. Girlhood is an anthem for women, a powerful exploration of the forces that seek to confine them, and a searing study of the transitions into and away from girlhood on a lifelong journey of discovery.