Girlhood

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.

• Winner, 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award Winner

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart, the essay collection, Abandon Me, and a craft book, Body Work. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, she is also the inaugural winner of the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary and the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The BAU Institute, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and others. Her essays have appeared in The Paris Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Granta, Sewanee Review, Tin House, The Sun, and The New York Times. She is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program.