Think Out Loud

Growing up: Selections from the Portland Book Festival

By Sage Van Wing (OPB)
Dec. 21, 2022 2 p.m.

Broadcast: Wendesday, Dec. 28

When journalist Hua Hsu was in college, his best friend Ken was murdered in a bizarre turn of events. The next day, Hsu started writing about his friendship with Ken to try to wrap his head around the enormous loss. Over the next 20 years, that writing eventually turned into his latest book, “Stay True.” OPB’s Jenn Chávez talks to Hsu about his childhood growing up as a second-generation immigrant in California, and how that, and the death of his friend Ken, shaped who he is today.

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When Melissa Febos was about twelve years old, her body changed, and so did her relationship with the world. Or actually, the world’s relationship with her. The way that society views — and uses and abuses — young women’s bodies is one of the many themes explored in Febos’ new book, “Girlhood.” Febos talks with OPB’s Tiffany Camhi about bodies, consent, mothers, cuddle parties and more.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We are going to bring you two conversations from the Portland Book Festival today that each explore the theme of growing up in America. OPB’s Jenn Chávez did the first conversation. I’ll let her introduce it.

Jenn Chávez: I’m so pleased to be joined by Hua Hsu today. Hua is a staff writer at the New Yorker and an associate professor of English at Vassar College. He serves on the executive board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop as well.

In the late 1990s, Hua was a college student in Berkeley California, writing zines, scouring record and bookstores, driving around the Bay Area with his friends with mixed tapes on blast. But the summer before their senior year, his best friend Ken was killed in a carjacking. After the sudden loss, Hua began writing everything down about Ken, and to Ken, about what happened next. And over the course of the 20 years that followed, what he started writing then became his beautiful new memoir “Stay True,” and I’m so honored to be here to talk with him about it. Hua Hsu, thank you so much for being here.

Hua Hsu: Thanks so much for having me. Thanks everyone for being here.

Chávez: So when you and Ken first meet, you are different in a lot of ways, there’s some ways in which you are opposites. I don’t think you liked him at first? But you write about the first time you met Ken, and the first time you actually met Ken. What do you think it was that allowed you both to click like that to actually meet?

Hsu: It’s so generic in hindsight, but it was the 1990s, I was very into being as different as possible, and I was desperate to distinguish myself from my parents, my close friends, everything. I went to college, as I think many people do, just to find people who were like mirror images of me, who were into the same esoteric things I was. The fact that he was just what I assumed to be this like mainstream fraternity bro kind of guy, that’s not the person I went to college to befriend.

But I think one thing you realize, particularly you grow older, that the people who kind of push you, the people who ask you why you dress the way you do, or whether you actually like this music, the people who try and figure out who you are and stick with you, that was someone that Ken was. He was very much someone who actually had patience for me as I rolled my eyes as aggressively as possible at all the things that he was into.

Chávez: You and Ken were both Asian American students at UC Berkeley, but from different backgrounds. You are the son of Taiwanese immigrants, he came from a Japanese American family that had been in the US for several more generations. How did your family background shape how you both were forming your identities within American culture in different ways?

Hsu: That’s a good question. I think for me, my parents immigrated in the early late sixties, early seventies, independent of one another, then I came along. They didn’t necessarily come to the United States pursuing the American dream as some legible thing. It was more like they were just going to graduate school and this was the next step in their education. Along the way they really settled into certain things that kind of marked them as Americans. They got really into music, my dad had this huge record collection, which had the effect of making music seem really uncool to me when I was growing up. But they were very much first generation immigrants, like work hard, keep your head down, don’t don’t seek attention, things like that.

A lot of my kind of misgivings or sort of misreading of Ken when we first became friends - and this is a micro distinction that kind of only makes sense I think to certain Asian Americans, but to meet a third or fourth generation Asian American whose parents don’t have an accent and who don’t have this strong relationship to the country that they came from, it’s very weird. So many of us are more recently immigrated. And so for him, I projected on him that he felt more at home in American culture. And it’s something that we talked about a lot, the dreams he had of the kinds of things he would want to see on tv or the movies, and the things that I claim to be too cool to ever want, probably because I just didn’t want to be disappointed.

Chávez: You mentioned a minute ago that your parents made music seem a little uncool to you, which I think later on in college, through your friendship with Ken and through your friendship with your other friends, y’all are building your identities together, and music played a huge role in that. And with you and Ken, your tastes were pretty different. This is a guy who liked Pearl Jam and Dave Matthews Band - and I just have to pause here and say I realized a wild coincidence, that Dave Matthews band is playing in Portland tonight.

Hsu: Are they here?

Chávez: Dave Matthews, are you there?

[Audience laughing]

But Ken was also very receptive to what you were putting on mixtapes for him, and interested in what you were listening to. Could you talk a little bit more about the role that music played in your friendships with Ken, and with your other friends at that time?

Hsu: I think as a teenager, you’re drawn to people because you’re so similar. And then everything outside of that Venn diagram of things you share is like “that’s you. That’s your identity.” You sort of fixate on these micro distinctions between you and your friends to figure out who you are, and to sort of triangulate space for yourself. And so for me, at a pretty young age, after I got over the fact that music was actually kind of cool and that I shouldn’t sort of dismiss my father for being so into records, it became the key way I would judge everyone. It became the key metric for whether I thought someone was cool. This is just sort of generically insufferable nineties person I’m talking about. In the longer view of history, the bands I was into and bands that he was into coexist the same Spotify playlists, you know?

I had this line in the book like “I had no problem painting myself into a corner, as long as I could claim that corner is my own.” I didn’t really have these dreams of entering into this larger cultural sphere. I was really into independently produced, homemade, indie music from like Portland and Seattle and Chapel Hill, these places that seem so cool and exotic, compared to Cupertino where I was growing up. I was very into just the stories that music could tell you about a different place. And I think music, for many of us, it’s how we learn how to have feelings. It’s how we learn how to love, it’s how we learn about heartache. You hear all these things before you actually experience them. And so I think for me, I was just always looking for music that spoke to how I felt, ot lyrically, but just how the song sounded. And what I was looking for, I thought, was very different from what other people wanted.

Chávez: I wanna circle back on this in just a minute. But talking about the narrative thrust of this book, as I mentioned in the beginning, the summer before your senior year, Ken is killed. It’s this very sudden loss, and right after his death you start writing and writing and writing. Why did you throw yourself into it to that degree, do you think? And what were you writing about?

Hsu: It happened over a weekend, everyone found out Monday. And one of the first things I did was just to go down the street and buy a journal, and start writing stuff down. I always liked writing, but it didn’t provide me any kind of emotional meaning, it was just something to do. And all of a sudden, I just desperately wanted to never forget. I wrote down all of our inside jokes, I just wrote down these like mundane episodes of our lives, because once the other person is gone, you realize that there will be no new memories. There will be no new inside jokes. So you begin to really horde and scavenge and protect everything that you do have. And that’s what I did.

And it was also a way to just not be present. It was a place to escape to. I would write him letters, I would write letters to like my future self, I would just write down jokes and vignettes, lists of places we’ve gone to. And it was just a way to never forget, but also to not be present in a way, and to kind of carve out some space in the past.

I became really obsessive with writing, and there are quite a few sentences in the book that were written in those first few days. And for the 20 years that followed, I would just go back to the journal, go back to these documents on my computer, and try and figure out not just how to describe things, because I think so much of writing is like “I’m thinking something or feeling something, how do I put this into language?” But I didn’t know why I was doing it. I didn’t know what I was searching for, necessarily. At a certain point, I had exhausted my memory. I had written it all down. But I didn’t know what it was for. I just knew that I would continue doing it until I felt ready for something.

Chávez: And as you just said, some of these sentences in this book were written right after he died. You didn’t realize it was going to be a book necessarily for years later. Can you talk more about how your process and your goals with writing changed over the course of this really long period of time?

Hsu: Yeah, absolutely. I think when people experience loss or you’re sort of grieving, sometimes you think that there’s a destination. Like “once I get over here, I’ll be fine,” or “once I get over here then I will have gotten over something.” But that’s not really how it works. Your relationship, not just with the event but with yourself, changes over time. And when I sat down to write in July of 1998, I didn’t think it would be a book because I didn’t think I’d become a writer, I thought I would just go to law school or something. But I knew that I would continue writing because it just felt necessary. But when I was writing from 1998 for like the next 10-15 years, it was often just an attempt to escape into the past. I was very much just stuck in the past in a way. I had all this ephemera from that night, just things: matchbooks, receipts, lottery tickets, cigarette packs. And I would often just write, and then look at all these things, look at all of the archive of our friendship that I had written down, and just sit there and try and make sense of it. I thought that was why I was doing it.

But then as I sat down to write it a couple of years ago, I realized that there’s no sense. This was a senseless, completely random thing. It’s possible to reflect on the good times and the joy and hold on to the happiness, and to think about what we shared, and that doesn’t necessarily diminish the sadness of what happened, or the tragedy. I think it’s a sad book, but I think there’s funny parts too. There’s also aspects of it that are the kind of banal ecstasy of being a young person and just how gorgeous it could be to just be in a parking lot with your friends trying to figure out what to do next, which isn’t something that you appreciate in the moment. And I think, reflecting on the beauty of those moments was something that I did not let myself do early on, because I was just so hung up on senselessness and the sadness. And so being able to balance the happiness of my memories with the sadness of what ultimately happens is something that only happened when I finished the book.

Chávez: Yes, this book is about fun and joy and the ecstasy of being with your friends and not knowing what you’re going to do next . . .

Hsu: Also actual ecstasy too.

[Mutual laughing]

Chávez: Yeah, exactly. When you go to that point, what were the most joyous parts of the book for you to write?

Hsu: I teach college students now, and I don’t know if it’s just a challenge that I face, but I think sometimes when an older person tells a younger person about the past, their youth, it always sounds like an ethical argument. Like “in the nineties we did this, and therefore it was better to be on AOL and to buy seven inch singles and to spend $13.99 on a cd.” Even if I enjoyed that experience because it was formative, I never mean to hold that over someone younger and say “you have to care about these things too.” And when I was writing the book, I didn’t want it to feel like I was just being nostalgic for the 1990s and that the reader should feel that too. I’m nostalgic for 1995 to 1998 because we didn’t know what was gonna happen. We were just kind of trying to figure out who we were. You’re young, you’re not thinking about the moment, you’re thinking about the next moment. You’re just living for adventure. And trying to capture what the texture of life in the 1990s, like using the primitive internet, making mixtapes, it’s not that these things are better than we have now, but time just felt very different then.

And so once I figured out how to describe that time, like what it felt like to be bored and the few things you could do to fill in that time, I honestly felt like I was just hanging out with us. Like “you don’t know what’s gonna happen, but let’s just let’s just be in this moment, we’re just driving to go get cigarettes right now, and like what was that like?” And so for me, that felt really, really good while I was writing it. And I felt bad about feeling good. But it’s also what made everything so sad to me in the end.

Chávez: You spoke earlier about this realization that the memories were not going to continue to form, and that you felt a little bit like you were in the past when you were writing, at least initially. As time went on, do you feel like you got to know Ken any better by writing about him after his death? And do you feel like your connection to him evolved or changed through this writing?

Hsu: That’s an amazing question. I do. I do feel a different relationship. We were both Asian Americans in the 1990s, and we would debate what we would now call representation. At the time we were just sort of projecting versions of ourselves at each other, and so we would talk about TV shows or movies, and we had these dreams of making our own student film. And I realized that whether it was intentional or not, that I’ve just become more like him over time, because he just was much more open hearted about his dreams. He wanted to see himself in the culture. I assumed that was impossible so I never dreamed of that. And I think it is just the product of me obsessing over, at this point, this apparition, obsessing over these snippets of conversation, conversation that you would never have any reason to recall and parse because you just have new conversations. But going back to all of these things that we would debate and talk about, and seeing, for example, Asian Americans in Hollywood and things like that, I do feel more connected to the size and scope of his dreams, which were just so much braver than mine were at that time. So I do feel a different relationship to him, even though he’s sort of frozen in who he was at the age of 20.

Dave Miller: We are bringing you two conversations from the Portland Book Festival today. I’ll let OPB’s Tiffany Camhi introduce this next author.

Tiffany Camhi: Melissa Febos is the best selling author of four books including “Girlhood”, a Lambda Award finalist and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and “Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative.” Melissa is an associate professor at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly. Again, thanks for being here. So excited to talk to you.

So we’re here to talk about “Girlhood.” This is a collection of essays that explores the ways society views and governs women’s bodies. It’s part memoir and part investigative reporting. The essays are very, very personal, and sometimes difficult to read only because of the truth that it lays bare about the cultural conditioning that girls and women endure through their lives. But Melissa also offers ways to break free from this narrative by digging deep into her own experiences. So let’s just start up with this reading from one of the book’s essays that revolves around what’s called a cuddle party. And to set the scene, you are in a room in a New York apartment, surrounded by mostly strangers, listening to the founder of these gatherings, his name is Adam, go over the cuddling ground rules.

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Melissa Febos: I’m gonna set the scene slightly more. I mean, this is Portland, so I assume a lot of you know about cuddle parties [Audience laughing]. It was this loft on the upper west side, and the furniture had been dragged out, I presume. And there were mattresses and pillows, like the whole apartment was a bed.

“So I’ve just heard the rules, the 11 rules of the cuddle party space. Some of these seemed more obvious, such as ‘pajamas stay on at all times’ and ‘respect people’s privacy when sharing about cuddle parties.’ Others, while comprehensible, were sentiments I’d never seen before, like ‘you are encouraged to change your mind.’ I had reviewed all of the rules before deciding to attend, and been heartened by the emphasis on consent, but that emphasis was even more pronounced in practice. Adam acknowledged how difficult it can be to establish clear boundaries around touch. ‘Many of us,’ he said, ‘did not learn how to say no in our family, or how to differentiate between different kinds of touch.’ When we got to rule three, ‘you must ask permission and receive a verbal yes before you touch anyone,’ he asked us to turn to a nearby person and perform a role play. One person was to ask ‘do you want to cuddle?’ The other was to answer ‘no.’ The first would then respond ‘thank you for taking care of yourself.’

The young man and I faced one another. ‘Do you want to cuddle?’ he asked. ‘No.’ I said. And my mouth involuntarily stretched into a smile, as if I needed to soften the refusal. My face grew hot and I felt myself blinking quickly. Was it really so hard for me to give an anticipated no? I felt uneasy in my body, surprised by the strength of my reaction to the exercise.”

Camhi: So that passage is among many others in “Girlhood” that I feel really encapsulates how difficult it is for people who are perceived as women to say no to men. Even when you are given explicit permission, you were told to say no, you do so apologetically. My question for you is what was your experience like at this cuddle party? And what do you think your body was trying to tell you?

Febos: My experience at the cuddle party was one of great surprise. So I go two times. The first time I went, a friend had texted me and said “this seems like something you’d go to, lol.” And when I read the phrase “cuddle party,” the cringe that I felt, it was like in my organs. And most people would take that as a deterrent. But that’s me. I was like “well certainly there’s something here that I should go find out about.” So I went to the cuddle party. And what I did not expect was that I would cuddle with people I didn’t want to. And so even after like a 30 minute workshop in affirmative consent and listening to the actual desires of one’s own body, it was like I had three little no tickets, and when those were gone, I only had yesses left. And I found myself negotiating. And these are strange, awkward straight men, not a demographic that I generally people-please. And I just… I could not explain. I still struggle to find easy words for it. I was there with my girlfriend, I’m a lifelong feminist.

So we left. And I was there with a friend who had suggested it and my girlfriend, and my girlfriend had been experiencing skin hunger because she’d lived in this really remote place. We get in the car, and they were like “oh my God I’m so high on oxytocin right now. How was your experience, Melissa?” And I was like “I hated every minute of it. I am so deeply uncomfortable. I don’t even know how to explain what happened.” I didn’t even have words to say, “I cuddled with people I didn’t want to.” It was only later, processing it.

And once I sort of processed, my girlfriend, who’s now my wife, was like “well you need to go back to the cuddle party.” And I was like “what? And she said “you have to go back and just say no to everyone.” And I was like “first of all, I’m a Libra, and that’s extremely rude.” I’m not going to go to a nice restaurant and order a glass of water, you know? And two, if I couldn’t say no the first time, why would I be able to do that the second time because I didn’t want to? And so I basically decided to figure out what had happened. I really think of that essay as a kind of mystery, where my own behavior is the body, and I was like “what happened?” And it took me a couple of years to go back when I really felt confident that I would be able to say no.

Camhi: That was the essay “Thank You For Taking Care of Yourself.” It’s one of the essays where you become a journalist, and you talked to a lot of other women, and it seems like that was part of your processing. You talked to a bunch of other women about their own sexual experiences, and you found that nearly everyone that you had talked to had been touched without their consent, or with something that you call “empty consent.” Can you just describe some of the things that you heard from the women you talked to?

Febos: Sure, Yeah. I’ll define empty consent first, which started out as the phrase “consented to sexual acts that you felt ambivalent about or actively did not want,” which is… cumbersome. In the first part of this hunt to figure out what happened, it didn’t take me very long to find this extremely long timeline, basically my whole life, but especially from early adolescence to adulthood, wherein I consented to forms of touch sexual and otherwise that I didn’t really want. And once I realized that, I thought “oh I see, this is one of those experiences that I thought was just me or that was so normalized I didn’t think about it at all, and now that I am thinking about it, it seems highly unlikely that it was just me.”

First I started talking to friends and my own mother, and then total strangers. And I had a list of questions, and one of those questions was that long phrase about “touch that you felt ambivalent about or actively didn’t want.” And just as a shorthand while I was talking to these people, I just started saying “empty consent” because it felt descriptive. And then as soon as I started using it, my interviewees picked it up and started using it as if it was a term that we already had known before, in this way that I think evidenced how much we needed words for it. And that was the experience I had over and over and over again in those interviews. Every single time they said “I’ve never told anyone this before” or “I’ve never even talked about this before” or “I’ve never even thought about this before. I just thought it was sex. I never thought to sort of differentiate between sex that I actively wanted and sex that I tolerated.”

Camhi: When I was reading about empty consent in that essay, I felt like I knew exactly what you were talking about. I didn’t need it defined.

Febos: Right! I’m really glad that the term came that way.

But I was expecting that I would find some similarity between my experience and some of theirs. But it was unanimous, everyone, including the men and non-binary people I spoke to, everyone. Which was, you know, shocking and not shocking.

Camhi: And a little bit sad.

Febos: A lot sad.

Camhi: One of the other things in this essay, you touched on this a little bit, is the idea of skin hunger. And that, I feel like a lot of people know about now because of the pandemic. There’s a wider audience of people that know what skin hunger is now. I know you wrote this before the pandemic, the cuddle party happened before the pandemic-

Febos: It really hit different when it came out, yeah.

Camhi: How did that land with you?

Febos: I really feel like I’ve made peace with the fact that all of my finished writing is an artifact of my best thinking at a particular moment in time. There was another part of me that was a little bit like “is anyone gonna really care about this because everybody wants to be touched right now?” But the end result of that whole mystery was like “oh, I have been ignoring my body’s wishes for so long I do not even hear them.” And in fact for me to get that information, I need to request it, and be like “body, do you want to cuddle with this person?” and then wait for an answer to travel through the mechanisms of all my dissociation, and then like finally appear in my consciousness.

Being isolated in the pandemic was, in some ways, a huge relief. And this of course partly comes out of the privilege of living with another human with whom I have healthy touch. But it sort of created for me an easier way when we started moving back into being in person, people started doing the thing that we should always do, which is say “do you hug?” We had become aware of other people’s boundaries in terms of illness. And we’re not socialized to be aware of people’s boundaries in terms of just plain old bodily sovereignty. And so it became this social enactment of this thing, this culture I’d had to create inside of myself, and sort of forge a pathway in a larger social landscape where that wasn’t the convention. And I, on my own, had to suffer a lot of awkward moments where people would come in for the expected hug and I would just back away. But it turns out the awkwardness passes almost instantly, whereas receiving hugs from people I don’t want full body contact with lasts a really long time.

So what happened was I heard from a lot of people, specifically women, who felt the same way. And the pandemic didn’t change the timeline of people’s lives and how they related to touch and how it had alienated them from their own bodies.

Camhi: A lot of “Girlhood” talks about how you hit puberty early, earlier than some of your peers, and how that shifted how boys and men perceived you. I’m wondering, what was your relationship to your body growing up?

Febos: Well, I had a very particular mom who raised me vegetarian. And again, I’m in Portland, this doesn’t sound weird. But we’re in a small town on the east coast in the eighties, and she went through all of my children’s books with a sharpie and changed the genders of the characters so that like Gretel was the one with the breadcrumb idea. So I was pretty sheltered in a way. And what that meant was that I had very little sense of myself, my embodied self, as it was perceived by others. And I was like a really vigorous, clumsy, outdoors kid. I just didn’t really think about it. I was totally unselfconscious and really happy in my body, and identified like physical strength and maybe some things that we associate with masculinity, those were sort of sources of pride for me as a kid, if anything was.

Camhi: And that all changed once you hit puberty. Did you understand why men and boys were treating you differently?

Febos: I mean yeah, they make it pretty clear. It’s funny because even as you’re asking me this, I know how I’ve written about it and how I explain it, but just now when when you asked me about it, I sort of felt the way that that time in my life is so opaque, because I just vacated my body so fast. I don’t even have a lot of specific memories that are infused with emotion, because it was so shocking and so uncomfortable that I was like “I’m out of here.”

This woman came to the signing for my earlier event, and she was talking to me about “Girlhood,” and she said to me “I had this body when I was 11,” which is a phrase that I’ve said many many times because that’s what it felt like. Suddenly I had been zipped into another body-suit, and that had completely changed my meaning as a human being in the world. It was incredibly disorienting, and so incredibly ordinary. And I think that fact, the commonness of that trauma, and it took me writing this whole book before I could even use that word to describe it, kept me from reckoning with that experience for decades and decades and decades, because I felt like I didn’t deserve to have been so affected by it, because so many of us are. And the thing I’ve come to, which I’ve come to at other points in my life but it has a hard time sticking, is that just because something is ordinary or common does not mean that it isn’t a trauma, or that it doesn’t hurt us.

Camhi: Well, speaking of that, in the book you kind of struggle to find another word for some of the encounters you’ve had. You don’t want to call it sexual assault, but maybe it’s something that implies less trauma or a different kind of trauma. I’m wondering why is it important for you to have a different language for that experience?

Febos: I think it was just a way of circumventing my own resistance. I knew I needed to look at it and that there was some work there, I was trying to write about it. And I could not “capital t” Trauma - I just could not classify my experience with the things that I thought of as serious traumas. And those experiences did exist in this very liminal gray area, and I couldn’t call them sexual assault because the other person had not assaulted me, I had consented. But psychologically, as I was reading all this literature about how sexual assault affects the brain and behavior, it was exactly the same as a lot of responses that I had to early experiences of touch that took just as long to undo, maybe longer because I was unwilling to acknowledge that the wound even existed. And so the word I come up with in the book, which still feels really unsatisfying, is “event.”

But I really just needed a placeholder. My wife writes poetry, and in her latest collection she uses brackets as a placeholder for things that she doesn’t want to name or where words feel insufficient, and that feels more accurate than any word I know of.

Camhi: What do you think it would be like for young girls to go through “Girlhood” today with social media?

Febos: My friends are in the second row here, we were just talking about this at lunch. In some ways it’s incomprehensible. I feel sort of split between, on one hand, feeling so incredibly grateful that there was no internet or social media as it exists today. There were like AOL chat rooms, so I was like sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night and pretending to be a 40 year old lesbian in chat rooms, and arguing with people about whether we should spell women with a y or not, true story. But that was it. And that inability to say no when I wanted to could have manifested in life threatening experiences. And I’m really glad that that opportunity was not there.

At the same time, the isolation of growing up in a small town, having these experiences that generated shame and having no one that I ever spoke to them about was so perpetuating. And I think if I had been able to sneak out of bed at night and find a chat room where I was able to anonymously talk about this stuff, if that had even occurred to me, or if I could watch a TikTok where someone was talking about it, I think it would have been easier to sort of break that silence and to not take responsibility for my own suffering for as long as I did.

So, I don’t know. It depends. I think it’s harder in some ways and easier in other ways.

Camhi: What kind of advice do you have for women who want to, or are currently trying to unlearn patriarchal perspectives? I know you’ve done a lot of work, it’s been like your life’s work.

Febos: It really is, it’s a life’s work, right? And it’s easy to get overwhelmed really, really quickly.

I would say the things that have made a sustainable life’s work for me are surrounding myself with other people who are up for that work, so that we’re not denigrating our bodies when we talk to each other, and where we’re sort of encouraging each other to live in liberated ways and to sort of recoup the sovereignty that we were conditioned to give away.

And I would also say that… following joy sounds really corny. But I’m thinking of one of my favorite essays of all time, Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power.” She just describes this capacity for joy that raises the bar in every area of one’s life. She describes the erotic as something you can experience writing a poem, building a bookshelf, making love with someone. And once you start to sort of bring that capacity for joy and that standard for integrity and self respect, and bring that into all of your relationships, it becomes sort of impossible to go backwards. That feels more possible to me than like facing down centuries of misogyny with my pencil.

Camhi: Melissa, thank you for being here and for talking to us.

Febos: Thank you.

Miller: That was Tiffany Camhi, in conversation with Melissa Febos, the author of “Girlhood.” Earlier, we heard Jenn Chávez in conversation with Hua Hsu. They spoke in front of audiences at the Portland Book Festival put on by Literary Arts.

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