I really just love Melissa Febos’ writing so much. It’s so beautiful, so emotional, so intense, so magnetic, so honest, so vulnerable, so real. She is such an amazing author. This is the second book I’ve read of hers, and it is a book about many things - about passion and losing oneself in love, about untangling a destructive romance, about finding ancestry, and Native heritage, about being queer, about being a woman, about addiction, and about mental health. She wraps her beautiful prose descri...

I dislike writing negative reviews, in particular for memoirs, because I know firsthand how much vulnerability goes into this brave, brutal genre. And I appreciated Melissa Febos's vulnerability in Abandon Me, as she describes lust, love, loss, and a gamut of other emotions in a raw and honest way throughout the book. Her essay "Labyrinths" slayed me with its intricate discussion of family, mental illness, and the importance of saving oneself.However, I did not appreciate the glorification of th...

While the narrative thread here is loose and frayed, the writing is beautiful, intimate and raw. She focuses mainly on three relationships: a mostly absent biological father, an adoptive, sea captain father, and a long-distance affair with a manipulative, married woman. As the title implies, she looks at how to cope when those you love are absent or unavailable. I'm also curious about her other memoir that looks at her time as a heroin addict and dominatrix in NYC. 😲

Electrifying, gut-wrenching, painful, gorgeous, personal... It was hard for me to get through it, and left me wrung dry and damp every time I put it down but was at the same time vividly addictive. Much, I suspect, like the author herself in some ways.

This book promises in terms of raw honesty and reflection. Her search for understanding her own deep seated fears of love and abandonment delivered in a poetic and philosophical way that was different from other memoirs I’ve read.

Just the title of Melissa Febos memoir...left me with questions. I understood the subject: ABANDONMENT.....but "Abandon Me".... depending on how it's said -and framed can have different meanings. I can't remember-specifically reading a book about the affects of abandonment- yet my father died when I was 4 and my mother often left me home alone at night starting at the of 5 -- so I was very interested in Melissa's memoir in which she include stories about her childhood. As I read through the stor...

My heart. As a whole better than the sum of its parts. Very well worth reading!

I read Whip Smart and didn't finish it. I appreciated so much of it but the writing didn't carry me through. Or it felt redundant. Or it was the wrong time for me to read it. Anyway, when I found an ARC of Abandon Me I was intrigued but not keeling over with excitement. I started the book that night and we were inseparable for days -- until literally minutes ago when I turned the last page. I fucked this book UP with underlining and circling and star-ing and exclamation point-ing and DOUBLE and

Luminous, courageous, seductive, sensual and mighty mighty strong. Febos' prose is so clear-sighted but so incredibly lush at the same time—reading this beautiful book felt like traveling toward land on a cold, cold ocean in a warm, velvet gown.

This book has some truly lovely sentences, but I was bored and ultimately insulted by the amount of repetition in it (how many times in the course of one book do I need to be introduced to her lover—coyly anonymous in some chapters, named in others—or the fact that her father is a sea captain? Not this many).

I thought maybe the book title was being nice and giving me a little hint, that it was saying “abandon me.” Believe me, I thought about it. But here’s why I stayed put:-One reviewer said it was sort of like The Chronology of Water (it wasn’t).-I wanted to see if it would get any better (it didn’t).-It had tons of gushy reviews at the beginning of the book (I don’t get it).-The language was sometimes seductive. So let’s go with the positive here. Yes, the language is amazing--lyrical and intense....

I read this book with my hand clutched over my heart. It is such an aching, loving piece of art. It chronicles enough elements of Febos's life that it is difficult to braid all the threads into one neat summary. While so much of her story is fascinatingly unique, the book felt universal, with the kind of insight that resonates bone-deep. Febos's writing is gorgeous: I was truly blown away by the quality of the prose. I wish I could read it for the first time again. If you're interested in lyrica...

While I appreciated Melissa’s candor and vulnerability, I didn’t like her perspective on abusive relationships. I think there’s value in reading memoirs, being able to empathize with the authors, and witnessing how they handle similar life obstacles. But given to the wrong audience at the wrong time, this book can carry a negative multiplier effect. As I was reading this, I was caught up in the heated energy of her relationship. I’ll admit that I forgot how abusive relationships are ugly and pai...

"I have always wanted to carve my name into the things I am afraid of losing. Perhaps the desire ot leave marks is more honestly a desire not to be left" (27)."Every story beings with an unraveling. This story starts with a kiss. Her mouth the soft nail on which my life snagged, and tore open" (131)."We all craft a story we can live with. The one that makes ourselves easier to live with. This is not the one worth writing. To write your story, you must fave a truer version of it. You must look at...

The book covers disparate themes, but all comes back to the subject of belonging. Does the dangerous thing of letting me close the book feeling like I know her. That's never true, but it does signify a strength in her writing that makes you feel fully let in. For fans of Maggie Nelson.

Something about this book I just found incredible. I found myself rearranging my entire life just to find the time to devote to reading it.I don't think it's for everyone. I don't expect everyone to read this and like it, but I really really enjoyed it.

“You’re not even hungry! she’d say. You can’t be. But I was hungry. For food, for approval, for secrets, for my legs’ push against the ground, for the ocean, for words. For none of these things at all., but for the brief satisfaction of filling myself with them.”What do we all have in common when it comes to love, regardless of our sexual preferences? It devours us, picks it’s teeth clean with our bones! It makes fools of us as we wait for returns when abandoned, a god/goddess when adored, venge...

I'm still unraveling my thoughts about Melissa Febos' memoir because there's just so much in here. I really appreciated her prose around rethinking her generationally traumatic family history and her ongoing issues with addiction in multiple forms—substance abuse, obsession and abandonment, and more.On the structural side of things, a few of the shorter stories felt a little clunky and repetitive, and the setup of the memoir was odd. (It features a ton of really short essays and then a very long...

How do I know a book deserves an automatic five-star rating? When I have eight pages of quotes in my journal. EIGHT.I could have copied this whole book down and still needed to go back and copy it all again. Melissa Febos’ prose is FLAWLESS. God. It’s so beautiful that I can not find a single thing to criticize.It is also DRIPPING with sex.In fact, most of the negative reviews on Goodreads say something like “Why does this book have to be so sexual?” Um, guys, you picked a book by dominatrix…did...

4.5 Stars. Holy shit. "I only wanted to know where I ended and everything else began, and I still do, in those oceanic days." This memoir isn't about just one thing as most people aren't only about one thing. But what connects Febos fragments about her Native American heritage, heroin addiction, an unhealthy lesbian relationship, a father at sea (presented as "The Captain"), and a complicated relationship with her biological dad is the pain of abandonment and how that abandonment can manifest it...