Abandon Me: Memoirs

Named One of the Best Books of 2017 by: Esquire Refinery29 LitHub BookRiot Medium Electric Literature The Brooklyn Rail Vol. 1 Brooklyn Largehearted Boy The Coil and The Cut. Winner of the Lambda Literary Jeanne Cordova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction Finalist Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography Finalist Publishing Triangles Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction An Indie Next Pick For readers of Maggie Nelson and Leslie Jamison a fierce and dazzling personal narrative that explores the many ways identity and art are shaped by love and loss. In her critically acclaimed memoir Whip Smart Melissa Febos laid bare the intimate world of the professional dominatrix turning an honest examination of her life into a lyrical study of power desire and fulfillment. In her dazzling Abandon Me Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection -- with family lovers and oneself. First her birth father who left her with only an inheritance of addiction and Native American blood its meaning a mystery. As Febos tentatively reconnects she sees how both these lineages manifest in her own life marked by compulsion and an instinct for self-erasure. Meanwhile she remains closely tied to the sea captain who raised her his parenting ardent but intermittent as his work took him away for months at a time. Woven throughout is the hypnotic story of an all-consuming long-distance love affair with a woman marked equally by worship and withdrawal. In visceral erotic prose Febos captures their mutual abandonment to passion and obsession -- and the terror and exhilaration of losing herself in another. At once a fearlessly vulnerable memoir and an incisive investigation of art love and identity Abandon Me draws on childhood stories religion psychology mythology popular culture and the intimacies of one writers life to reveal intellectual and emotional truths that feel startlingly universal.