100 memoirs project #9: Whip Smart, by Melissa Febos

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100 memoirs, 100 memoirs project, addiction, dominatrix, inspiration, Melissa Febos, redemption, sex work narrative, Whip Smart

People are going to pick up and want to buy Whip Smart because it sounds salacious, gratuitous, sexy. I picked it up because I thought, holy shit, how brave to admit this. I will learn something about how to write the stuff that most scares me to share about myself (spoiler: I’m not a dominatrix).

I was right and wrong. Febos is brave, and makes brave admissions—but not only in the way you think. Her entire tenure as a dominatrix was marked by her attempts at distancing herself from this work she did to put herself through college.

Whip Smart is an addiction narrative. And the addiction isn’t kink or sexual power trips, but every drug you can think of, most notably a serious heroin addiction.

What’s different about this particular addiction narrative is how well the narrator hid, while creating even more elements of her life to hide, all while hiding nothing from the reader.

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100 memoirs project #8: Heart Berries, by Terese Marie Mailhot

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I’m behind, because life, but I’m reading!

I’m actually bumping a memoir I read two months ago to write this post because the book’s so good that I’ve been talking about it and now someone wants to borrow it. Must write this post before I lend the book away for who knows how long!

I recently visited Midtown Scholar, an acclaimed indie bookstore in Harrisburg, PA. It’s shameful that this was my first time—I, a native central Pennsylvanian—stepping foot into this space, but hey, now I’ve been there. And I’ll be going back.

In a 2010 Publisher’s Weekly review, Alison Morris described Midtown Scholar as “a cavernous space filled with some 100,000+ second-hand, out-of-print, and scholarly (…) books” that combines with an enormous warehouse inventory to make “the largest used book collection between New York City and Chicago.” The store also houses a coffee shop and its owners regularly host readings, workshops, and author events. It’s basically Disneyland for writers and readers.

I walked in, ordered a mocha and a chocolate peanut butter brownie, and immediately found a memoir to curl up with for the afternoon—one that had been on my Amazon nonfiction wish list for some time.

Roxane Gay calls Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries a “memoir in essays,” among other things.

100 memoirs project #7: Love and Trouble, by Claire Dederer

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100 memoirs, 100 memoirs project, Claire Dederer, female adolescence, Love and Trouble, memoir, young female voice

I haven’t done a memoir post in a bit, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading memoir.

I’ve been reading a lot, actually. Since I finished Ta-Nehisi Coates’ two books, I’ve completed my fifth re-read of Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water (someday I will be courageous enough to write a post about what Lidia’s memoir means to me). Based on her recommendation, I then bought and blazed through Whip Smart, by Melissa Febos (another forthcoming post), almost immediately after I finished Dederer. I’m reading essays by Hanif Abdurraqib and poems by Danez Smith and Greek mythology by Robert Graves. I’m reading Carl Jung. I’m reading tarot and headlines.

There is so much to take in, so much to keep us up at night, that I might as well stay up late reading instead of worrying. Most days, this works out.

I worried a lot while reading Dederer. Love and Trouble comes with a subtitle: “A Midlife Reckoning.” At first I thought, I’m not going to relate to this. Silly me. I am almost 37. I’m unafraid of being 37, but it should be noted that while I am approaching what we think of as middle age, I don’t feel like I am. I am often mistaken for a college student on the campus where I work. I still get carded more often than not. I climb mountains and blast the same music I blasted 20 years ago—and I dress like it’s 20 years ago, too. I don’t feel 37.  Take that for what it’s worth to you, even hate me for it, if you will.

For so many women, being hated is nothing new.

100 memoirs project #6: The Beautiful Struggle, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Ta-Nehisi Coates is a writer I’ve followed for some time but who I am thoroughly intimidated to write about. He is superlatively intelligent when it comes to the violent racism of American history, a history I am glimpsing and uncovering more and more every day. I will never, can never, know a fraction of what Coates knows, but I swear I will read everything he writes from now on.

The Beautiful Struggle is a beautiful book. (Shit, see? I can barely write this.)

100 memoirs project #5: The Telling, by Zoe Zolbrod

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CW: molestation, incest, child abuse, domestic violence

About a month ago, I took a vacation day from work, checked into a hotel for seven hours, and wrote 6,000 words of truth that I’ve never told anyone before. At least, not in so many words.

I had just started reading Zoe Zolbrod’s memoir The Telling, and it was clearly affecting me. I have some stuff to tell. This entire undertaking of reading 100 memoirs is about informing how I will tell it.

But the telling itself is important. It is power reclaimed, transformation, revolution. It is survival.

100 memoirs project #4: Rise, by Cara Brookins

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CW: Domestic violence

In my few and precious windows of down time, when I’m not reading memoir, I’m watching HGTV.

Tiny House Hunters. Fixer Upper. Property Brothers. Love It or List It. I love me some Love It or List It.

I’m saving for a house, see, and I know I won’t be buying a turn-key, move-in ready, ultra-modern sanctuary. There’s gonna be demo. Mudding. Sanding. Scraping. Replacing. Upgrading.

This TV viewing is research. If I’m having a bad day, I turn it into a drinking game: one sip of red wine every time someone says “open concept,” asks for a large kitchen island, or muses “this space has a lot of potential.” Two sips for every mention of shiplap or subway tile. Three sips if they find asbestos or want a wall blown out but can’t understand that it’s load-bearing and they’ll need to pay out the ass to install a steel beam.

I first heard about Cara Brookins’ memoir Rise from TV, in fact. In January, Brookins was on The Today Show after her book was released, filmed in her 3,500-square-foot labor of love.

The amazing thing to me is that she did the grueling, round-the-clock, self-directed work of building a house based solely on watching youTube videos and then pulled off writing a great book about it.

100 memoirs project #3: The Woman Who Fell from the Sky, by Jennifer Steil

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I have the pleasure of working with five amazing women through the Center for Creative Writing, which I now direct, and one of them is prose writer and journalist Jennifer Steil. I’ve had her memoir The Woman Who Fell from the Sky on my bedside table for a while now and committed to reading it when I arranged for Jennifer to give a reading at the college where I work.

See, Jennifer was planning to fly in to attend a retreat I was hosting for all my Center teachers. But she currently lives in London and, well…Is there anything else you want me to do, if I’m already making the trip? she asked me when the retreat was in its planning stages.

Writers need work. I knew her memoir was about editing a newspaper in a war-torn country, so she and I collaborated on a pitch to have her read and talk about peacebuilding through art, peace efforts in Yemen, and her experiences witnessing peace and conflict as a Westerner in a Muslim city in 2006, for which she would earn an honorarium from my department at the college (peace studies).

Jennifer flew in last week in the middle of a Stacia hurricane.

100 memoirs project #2: Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away, by Alice Anderson

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CW: Domestic violence, rape

Alice Anderson’s Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away nearly undid me.

One thing I’m learning about memoir is that the good ones are supposed to do that. They are so real, they cut like a butcher knife on the throat and chest…

When I got to the passage in Anderson’s book about her then-husband’s most brutal assault, and her sweet small boy toddled onto the page and my consciousness to take that knife away, how could I not see my own son’s face over my ex’s shoulder when ______?

No really, I’m asking. How?

(I’m a little frustrated with myself for being still so vulnerable to these stories that simultaneously and quite literally saved me, continue to save me. I’m working on it.)

I heard Anderson speak on a memoir panel at this year’s AWP conference. I took lots of notes, but what I most remember is what she said about expected narratives: Could she take her story of abuse and “make it a love story?”

Well damn if she didn’t.

100 memoirs project #1: The Art of Memoir, by Mary Karr

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I wanted The Art of Memoir to be the first book I read and posted about for my 100 memoirs project. It’s not a memoir, but it’s about memoir, and Karr is an expert who frequently delves into autobiography while dispensing her brilliant advice, so it counts.

It took me a long time to finish this book because I was underlining so much. Then I stopped underlining and just started writing things down. Then my hand got tired so I started taking pics of whole passages so I could carry them with me.

The Art of Memoir made me think two conflicting thoughts, sometimes both at once: I can/can’t do this.

“Writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist,” you see.

Here are some actual notes-to-self I made in my journal, and some of the most impactful quotes or tips I absorbed, while reading The Art of Memoir: