Body Work: Punching Through the False Wall
I.
Five years ago, I attended group therapy for sexual assault survivors. The methodology was storytelling: each participant would be given one session to tell the full story of their assault. I agonized over mine, writing a loose outline despite having been over it an endless number of times in my own head. Once the four pairs of familiar eyes were fixed on me, I told them the version of the story I knew best, which is to say, the one that allowed me to keep living with it. They responded with love in their eyes and words of compassion: I had nothing to be ashamed of. Though relieved it was over, the next day something nagged at me. I had left out an important detail.
I thought of this experience as I was reading the final chapter in Melissa Febos’s new craft book, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. In four discrete essays, she rejects traditional notions about the relationship between writing and therapy, between confessing and trauma recovery, and of the power of navel-gazing in transforming the world. If there is a singular thesis, it’s summed up in the author’s note: “Fuck them. Write your life.” But this book is less about how to write than it is about how to live, and in the process, the author of Whip Smart, Abandon Me, and Girlhood teaches us that the two are inextricable.
In the essay that led me to think of my group therapy experience, “The Return,” Febos writes of the tradition of confession in the catholic church and its power to transform, by giving the confessor some of their agency back. Naming the source of our deepest shame forces us to reckon with our ownership over it—and our own guilt. She suggests that personal narrative can offer writers a means to a similar end; however, one in which the audience consists of readers, real or imagined, and the higher power is art itself. Febos’s faith lies in the power of telling her own story, the change she experiences when speaking truths she had long found “unspeakable.”
My unspeakable truth, or so I’d always thought, was that I experienced a pleasurable physical response during a sexual assault. It was this detail that invalidated my experience, that made it unnamable for what it was (rape), that caused me to self-blame instead of put responsibility where it belonged—on the perpetrator. But this is not the part I’d left out; there was something else. Something that for many years, I couldn’t imagine telling a soul, let alone a room full of people. And writing it for the entirety of the internet? That seemed out of the question.
II.
If you’re reading this review, I probably don’t need to tell you all the ways confessional writing is bashed in literary discourse. “Gendered bullshit,” I once heard Febos call the phenomenon after a reading at the New York Public Library. Her essay, “In Defense of Navel-Gazing” takes on those who suggest that writing about ourselves, our bodies, and our traumas is somehow gauche. “I don’t think it’s a stretch to wonder,” she writes, “if the navel, the locus of all this disdain, has something to do with its connection to birth, and body, and the female.” The essay argues that the resistance to stories about trauma is a resistance to social change. That is, if we were forced to contend with how ordinary these experiences truly are, we would become implicated—and consequently, forced to do something about them.
If the point of literature is, as Febos believes, to “transform society,” then it stands to reason that first we must first transform ourselves. Body Work is an argument for writers to unlearn what has been programmed into us—to look beyond the narratives that we’ve already accepted about ourselves because, as Febos writes, “the truer story is usually the one more worth telling.” She does not pretend that this is a pleasant process for a writer, or anyone trying to figure out how to live with themselves. Febos lays out how she approaches this challenge particularly well in “Mind Fuck,” an essay about sex writing:
Over the years, I’ve come to look forward to the point in my own writing at which continuing seems both incomprehensive and loathsome. That resistance, rather than marking the dead end of the day’s words, marks the beginning of the truly interesting part. That resistance is a kind of imaginative prophylactic, a barrier between me and a new idea. It is the end of the ideas that I already had when I came to the page—the exhaustion of narrative threads that were previously sewn into me by sources of varying nefariousness or innocuity. It is on the other side of that threshold that the truly creative awaits me, where I might make something that did not already exist. I just have to punch through that false wall.
When I read this passage, I thought about the stories that had been “sewn into me,” and the inevitable pain that would result if I were to deliberately rip out the stitches. It occurred to me that the artificial barriers I’d built around my own story didn’t so much as protect me as they did obstruct my view. If I couldn’t see them, I couldn’t live— let alone write—freely.
Febos notes that the highest forms of art must disrupt our internal scripts. Indeed, that was the result I experienced after reading Body Work. I began to see my own false walls and what had been swept behind them: a trauma that had warped my relationship to my body and my pleasure. This is all to say that I don’t think it’s an accident that Febos’s essay about writing better sex directly follows her essay arguing for writing about one’s trauma.
III.
In a book like Body Work, it’s impossible to avoid the question: Is writing therapy? The answer Febos seems to lean into is a good one: The two are not unrelated. She notes that while the act of writing is not itself therapy, “the act of transforming pain into art need not preclude healing.” However, she’s careful to point out that “being healed does not excuse you from the extravagantly hard work of making art.”
A recurring theme in Febo’s work involves the demolition and reconstruction of the self, which also happens to also be a description of how one might describe the psychological process of recovering from trauma. It follows that her craft essays might help a writer sharpen the tools to do both. But they also encourage us to actively resist the forces that keep us silent, to drown out those voices that proclaim our “diaries” not worthy of becoming literature, and of those who ask, as a woman did to me recently, “so how much of your book was therapy?”
Febos tells of a question she received at a Q and A for her first book, Whip Smart, a memoir about her experience as a professional dominatrix and heroin addict. A woman stood up to ask her if she was ashamed. “No,” she responded, “I am shameless.” She goes on to explain to the reader that it wasn’t that she hadn’t felt shame when writing the book, but had instead actively chosen to reject it.
Shaming is done from the outside, and it never ceases. Those external reactions, many of which I’ve internalized have very little to do with my actual body and actual sex. They are what I have had to navigate around or through or what I have to annihilate if I ever want to write about my actual body and my actual sex.
Shame, she argues, is a tool of oppression, a method of societal control. By telling our stories, we de-stigmatize basic human experiences and strip shame of its power. One needn’t look any further than the book bans proposed by conservative legislators to understand how “navel-gazing” and “confessing” threaten the status quo.
IV.
In her essay, “A Big Shitty Party,” Febos offers practical advice for how to minimize the fallout of writing about other people—a common question facing memoirists. She shares six episodes that, through trial and error, helped her develop her own ethical code. But what about how to deal with the fallout of writing about yourself? This kind of advice is conspicuously absent, perhaps because it’s better dealt with on an individual basis, and by a therapist. Or maybe, it doesn’t exist.
What does reveal itself over the course of a book drawn from the author’s experience writing three other books is that the process is incremental, and often nonlinear. When tasked with writing the unspeakable, Febos shares one of her own practices. Every morning, she writes in her journal: “Today, I reject the patriarchy’s bad ideas.” She shows us that punching through these false walls requires bloodying our knuckles over and over. It will not get easier; we can only get stronger. Transforming the self is not a painless endeavor, which is why we also need therapy, writing workshops, and other forms of community.
My own process started in group therapy—or really, in a journal, where I noted the previously unthinkable and still unspeakable fact that I’d had an orgasm during a sexual assault. I was handed a loving audience to whom I felt safe divulging this truth. But only after receiving their compassion was I able to rip out the thread that had been holding me together—and rewrite it with one that threatened to break me apart. I asked the therapist if I could have fifteen minutes in another session to share the additional detail, which involved a vocal response I’d had during the height of the experience. I’d cried out something that one would expect only to hear from a consenting woman during the throes of orgasm: “Don’t stop.”
There it was, dropped into the next group session like vomit on a freshly mopped floor. And my audience? They helped me clean it up, assured me it wasn’t my fault, and anyway it could have happened to anyone, so no reason to keep punishing myself over it.
I am not shameless, but I reject shame. I am not fearless, but I reject fear. I didn’t need to read Body Work to be convinced of the radical power of personal narrative—I’d experienced it firsthand. But it did help me name the forces that needed resisting, and outline the practices that might allow me to access my own truths. It dared me to imagine an audience—outside of therapy—who might be able to gain something from receiving what I considered to be my own darkest confessions. And all that was left was the extravagantly hard work of making art.