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April 9, 2021
Melissa Febos's Playlist for Her Essay Collection "Girlhood"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Girlhood is one of the year's best (and most important) books, a bold and astute examination of being a young woman in America.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
"Profound and gloriously provocative, this book. . . transforms the wounds and scars of lived female experience into an occasion for self-understanding that is both honest and lyrical. Consistently illuminating, unabashedly ferocious writing."
In her words, here is Melissa Febos's Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection Girlhood:
I struggled with the title of Girlhood as soon as I realized I was writing this book. It was obviously the correct one, but somehow also a terrible misfit. The word girlhood conjures all the wrong images: pink things, softness, innocence, dolls—the elements that comprise a fantasy of girlhood, many of which I have loved and craved but which are also accoutrements of the trap that gender can be for children and in many ways was for me.
In the end, I made peace with the title because the irony of it, when placed on the cover of the book I wrote, makes a kind of perfect sense. The primary project of these essays is to carve out more space in our notions of girlhood for the aspects of it that we don’t talk about, that aren’t used to sell us things, and that some of us spend our whole lives feeling alone in. I want to carve out that space in the word itself, too. I want to associate with it more of the messy, painful, traumatic, erotic, furious, and feral parts of my own childhood and adolescence, which I now know are shared by countless others.
Freeing my own mind from the comprehensive mindfuck of being a girl in this country has been slow and painful work, but it has been worth it. Writing this book was part of it. I wanted to show that it was possible, how it has been possible. For me, that work has sometimes been hard to recognize. I spent a lot of my youth specializing in habits that look like self-destruction, but I have learned that sometimes survival looks like sabotage, and from the outside, we can’t know what anyone’s alternative was, or how worse. I’m glad I made it, that I had these songs (and so many others) to help carry me through. For years before I could articulate my troubles or their solutions, I found a name for them in music.
Whitney Houston “The Greatest Love of All”
I’m eternally glad that my young life overlapped so exactly with Whitney Houston’s career. There are so many songs that I could have put on this list, but I chose this one, from her first studio album, because it was the first I ever heard. I actually first heard it sung by my mother, who loved it and adopted it as a lullaby for me. She used to rub my back and sing me to sleep—mostly protest songs from '60s folksingers, but somehow Whitney got in there, too. The first time I heard it on the radio, I already knew all of the words, and I’ve kept loving it all these years.
Sweet Honey in the Rock “Rivers of Babylon”
I always say that my first concert was Throwing Muses, which was the first concert I attended on my own. My real first concert was Sweet Honey in the Rock, where I remember running around the outdoor stage with a gang of other barefoot children while our parents danced and sang and swayed. For all the hardships that followed, my early life was full of places that felt safe, in which I could play freely, inhabit my body without wondering if I was acting correctly for a girl.
Bikini Kill “Feels Blind”
For eight years, I attended this hippy/punk-rock summer camp that really sort of saved my life, or at least my spirit. Instead of canoeing or campfire singalongs, we smoke cigarettes, talked about our feelings, and made zines. Every year there was an event called “Rock & Roll Day” during which campers and staff (just a few years older than us) would pull out their guitars and perform on a makeshift outdoor stage all day long, like a tiny music festival. One year, Julia Stiles, who was a good pal and fellow longtime camper, pulled me aside and informed me that we were going to perform—her on guitar, me on vocals. She handed me a tape and told me to learn this song. I had never heard Bikini Kill before that day. I sat in my cabin listening to it over and over, and when I emerged, something in me had changed. I understood that anger could be beautiful, that art could say something better than any speech. I can’t tell you about the quality of our performance, but I can tell you that I loved screaming those lyrics into a mic: If you could see but were always taught/ What you saw wasn't fucking real yeah.
Billie Holiday “God Bless the Child”
Starting during my adolescence, I took singing lessons for years with a teacher who wanted me to sing opera or numbers from well-known musicals. To her disappointment and eventual resignation, I only want to sing jazz songs made famous by Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, and Lena Horne. Billie was my favorite. I think I saw her as proof that one could be beset by any number of troubles and still make beautiful art out of that misery. I remember singing “God Bless the Child” in a recital once, and changing the line “God bless the child that’s got his own” to “got her own.”
PJ Harvey “Rid of Me”
So much of Girlhood is about naming the parts of my experience that felt unspeakable. Not necessarily in the sense of the forbidden, but the literally unspeakable. How could I ever put words to the most ragged, feral, ravenous, keening parts of me? Well, PJ Harvey did it. Her music perfectly named so many feelings that I didn’t know how to describe, or even if I was the only one who felt them. I found a kind of home in her music and I loved every one of her albums, but this one the most. I have a novel-in-progress that I pull out every now and then, which is all about girlhood, too, and its working title is Rid of Me.
Tracy Chapman, “For My Lover”
I have loved Tracy Chapman’s music for as long as I can remember and could have chosen any number of her songs for this list. This one tugged on me in a very specific way, a way that I think foretold of my most passionately codependent future relationships. As a girl, I was definitely infatuated with the idea of sacrificing everything for love, or having everything sacrificed for me. Thankfully, therapy and years of recovery have dissuaded me of this fantasy. Also, living it and realizing that that sort of love is not actually love, but a kind of hell.
Slick Rick (w/Outkast) “Street Talkin”
When The Art of Storytelling came out, I was 18, living in Boston, and newly addicted to heroin. I spent countless hours driving around in my battered Volkswagon Golf—a car whose doors didn’t lock—listening to Slick Rick’s wonderfully creepy/husky/silky voice. I still know all the lyrics to most of the album’s songs, but can hardly bear to listen to it, because it’s like reentering my 18-year-old self at a moment before things got very dark; her innocence is almost too much to bear.
Ani DiFranco “Little Plastic Castle”
My younger brother once ruefully speculated on the amount of space in his memory occupied by Ani lyrics that had seeped into his consciousness like secondhand smoke, due to all the hours I spent listening to her in our childhood home. It feels like a kind of betrayal to include on this list any song other than “Both Hands,” which is the truest anthem of my queer girlhood, but this song evokes a less melancholy set of memories. It reminds me of the freedom and fun I found as a teen, newly living on my own, with other young queer people—doing drugs, yes, but also sitting for hours in diners, smoking and talking; dancing and laughing our asses off. It reminds me of having a shaved head and piercings all over, my own money, and a set of friends in which I saw myself, something I could never find in my hometown.
Erik Satie, “Première Gymnopèdie”
If I struggle to confront the time capsule of Slick Rick, then Satie is close to unbearable. In the darkest moments of my addiction, I used to listen to this song on repeat, sort of soaking in despair. I couldn’t see a way out, but I knew that if I didn’t find one soon I was going to die. In a way, I think I listened to it as a kind of dirge for myself.
Big Star “Thirteen”
This song came out in 1972, but I didn’t hear it until 2003, when I first got sober and a friend in recovery put it on a mixtape. Like so many people before me, I fell in love with it immediately. Something about the sweetness of Alex Chilton’s voice made me think back to myself at 13 with a new kind of tenderness. Instead of wishing her exiled, I wished she’d had access to a little more sweetness at that age.
Dar Williams “When I Was a Boy”
The song was released in 1993, just two years after my body and my experience of being a person in the world transformed. Until the age of 11, I had been a wild, tree-climbing, baseball playing, confident and athletic kid. I liked floofy dresses, and was also covered in scabs and bruises from playing so hard. I delighted in my own strength. Gender didn’t trouble me much until I suddenly had breasts, the first among my peers. That was the end of my bodily freedom and confidence for a long time. This song made me want to cry when I heard it at 13, and it makes me want to cry now, thinking of all the years I was estranged from myself, all the years that so many of us are. I’m grateful to have found so many paths back, that writing has helped light the way.
Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart and two essay collections: Abandon Me and Girlhood. The inaugural winner of the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary and the recipient of fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The BAU Institute, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Foundation, and others; her essays have appeared in The Paris Review, The Believer, McSweeney's Quarterly, Granta, Sewanee Review, Tin House, The Sun, and The New York Times. She is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program.
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