Pain Is Not Always an Emergency: The Millions Interviews Melissa Febos
When I was an undergraduate in college, I sent a fan letter via Facebook to an author, a personal essayist, that I greatly admired. To my astonishment he replied, and an email correspondence ensued. Immediately I inundated him with craft-related questions, the most pressing of which was about navel-gazing and how to avoid it. I wanted to write personal essay like he did, but the fear of being interpreted as navel-gazy—vain, narcissistic, self-obsessed—often kept me from writing about myself. This author’s work, though intensely personal, never felt myopic. He sent a lengthy and enlightening reply with the subject line “How to Avoid Navel Gazing.” I’d never treasured an email so much.
You can imagine my curiosity, then, when I opened Melissa Febos’s Body Work and began to read its first chapter, “In Praise of Navel Gazing.” It didn’t completely change my mind on the topic, but it made me reconsider my initial aversion to being seen as a navel-gazer. Febos incisively articulates the systemic undervaluing of women’s narratives and how personal writing has been gendered as feminine—to its detriment. “Bias against personal writing is often a sexist mechanism,” she writes, “founded on the false binary between the emotional (female) and the intellectual (male), and intended to subordinate the former.” If writing about oneself is a feminine act and feminine acts lack intellectual rigor, I wanted to avoid bringing myself into my work at all costs. The trouble was that I bought into this false logic in the first place.
I diverged with Febos on other points, though, such as the extent to which reading is an “exercise in empathy” (), as well as her claim that “not a manifesto.” Even more than a craft book, it is a manifesto that claims and declares, as its. She implores her readers to:
