CRAFT therapy

HOME. It is an appropriate place to start a conversation with Melissa Febos about her writing. Much of her work, whether in the form of memoir or essays—or some altogether different, hybrid form of creative nonfiction distinctly her own—begins and ends, somehow or another, here. In her first book, the memoir Whip Smart (Thomas Dunne Books, 2010); her first essay collection, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury, 2017); and now in her latest collection, Girlhood, published by Bloomsbury in March, Febos has drawn a map of her early life on Cape Cod so vivid and precise, readers are able to trace her route to the school bus stop in their mind’s eye. As a girl Febos greeted the squealing door of that bus with her head in a book, an act she devoted herself to in part because reading passed the time while her father, a merchant marine ship’s captain, was away at sea.

If this sounds like the stuff of fairy tales, that’s not far off. Born in 1980, Febos lived in the only room at the top of the stairs in a house very much like a cabin in the woods. From her attic window she could see through the skeletal branches of the trees to a kettle hole pond that plunged fifty feet at its heart and stayed chilly even in the summertime. That room, Febos says, “was my little world.”

“There was a moment during the writing of Abandon Me when I made a conscious decision to yield to the images and the place of my childhood, which was something I had resisted until that point. When I did they swallowed me.”

She is speaking over Zoom from where she lives now, in Iowa City, with her partner, the poet Donika Kelly. They both teach creative writing in the English department at the University of Iowa. Febos sits close to the screen, in a long-sleeved flannel with purple, pink, and black tones that match her new book’s cover. The orderly office behind her, with