Melissa Febos’ Intimate Memoir Abandon Me Will Tap Into Your Fears

Melissa Febos’ secrets are widely known. As she points out in her new collection of essays, Abandon Me, to read her available work is to understand intimate details about her life. She documented everything from her sex work to her drug addiction in her first memoir, Whip Smart, and her sophomore book highlights the dark influence of her desires and fears with a similar vulnerability.
Abandon Me reads chronologically in only the vaguest sense. Each essay’s backbones take us through Febos’ life—from her childhood on Cape Cod waiting for her sea captain father to her heroin addiction in her early twenties to an emotionally abusive relationship in her early thirties. The essays leap back and forth in time, overlapping to create a Venn diagram that gradually reveals a complete picture. At the point where the essays meet sits Febos herself, a woman willing to confront challenging questions about her life with openness and honesty.
Febos’ birth father was an alcoholic, and her mother left him and met another man who raised Febos as his own. These family bonds became a source of pain as Febos grew into a teen, during which time she started to engage in near passive sexual behavior; the line between what she wanted and what she allowed out of a desire to be wanted is unclear. Febos eventually dropped out of high school, became addicted to heroin and started working as a dominatrix (a career that was by turns empowering and exhausting). All of these scars are laid bare in her writing, twisted and turned for the reader to examine.