Abandon Me

Starred review from September 19, 2016
Febos’s (Whip Smart) second memoir is part lovesick devotional and part meditation on the intersection between desire and identity. She outlines the progression of a doomed relationship in exquisitely romantic detail (“Her mouth the soft nail on which my life snagged, and tore open”) alongside the story of reconnecting with her birth father, a Wampanoag Native American and “career drug addict and alcoholic.” As she explores her native roots through the lens of historical trauma and cultural erasure, she finds an explanation for a viscerally felt absence and her willingness to be “colonized” by a controlling lover. She captures the contradictions of female sexuality, complicated further when the object of one’s desire is another woman, and delves into the push and pull of the other relationships that molded her, as with her adoptive father, a sea captain whose fierce love and
frequent absence were contradictory formative influences: “Every time he left port, we wrecked again.” Her mastery over metaphor is astonishing: describing a moment of heartache, she writes, “I was the sound of breaking. Pedestrians and bicyclists looked around, covered their ears.” What might be mere navel-gazing for a less brilliant author is made powerfully universal here. Though the particulars are hers, just about anyone can relate to the feeling of a chasm opening up inside. Febros’s awakening to her full identity, even its ugliness, is a powerful and redemptive epic. Agent: Ethan Bassoff, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin.

December 15, 2016
An award-winning nonfiction writer explores the personal roots of a powerful and destructive love/hate relationship she shared with a married lesbian. As a child, Febos (Creative Writing/Monmouth Univ.; Whip Smart, 2010) suffered from separation anxiety and nightmares, and she sleepwalked whenever her sea-captain father was away. When she was awake, she routinely "counted all the dangers my father might meet" and feared that she might be found unlovable enough that he would never return. Febos took solace in erotically charged stories that, as in the 1986 film Labyrinth, merged fantasy and horror. But in her teenage and young-adult years, her escapist tendencies took the forms of sexual obsessions with men and women and a drug addiction. When Febos met Amaia, a beautiful married lesbian who lived on the other side of the country, the attraction was immediate and intense. Amaia wooed her with expensive gifts that reminded her of the gifts her father would bring back to her. She writes, "each object was a promise, something I could hold when I could barely remember her face." Caught in a web of obligation and desire that was as pleasurable as it was disturbing, Febos began a cross-country relationship that, in its secrecy and impossibility, was profoundly erotic. Her lover made Febos feel worshipped; Febos, in turn, found herself idolizing her lover. Yet at the same time, the author also experienced a primal fear of abandonment that came from Amaia's physical, and at times emotional, unavailability. Her understanding of the relationship was heightened by her own coming to terms with the part-Native American, substance-abusing biological father she never knew growing up. With Amaia, she experienced both the paternal genetic legacy of addiction as well as the traumatic "legacy of abandonment, of erasure" that was her birthright as a Native American. Erotic and dark, the book is a courageous exploration of love as the ultimate form of plenitude and annihilation. A lyrically visceral memoir of love and loss.

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December 15, 2016
Febos' (Whip Smart, 2010) second book is a collection of self-aware, stylish, autobiographical essays on love, addiction, and inheritance. Exploring her embarrassment over what she sees as her endless need for love, she touches on her Native American, Puerto Rican, and European heritages. She draws from her youth, growing up on Cape Cod with a veritable (and often absent) sea captain father, from her post-high-school-dropout days spent high on heroin, and from classical philosophy, psychology, mythology, and literature. In the longest essay in the collection, which shares the book's title and occupies more than half its pages with its 62 vignettes, she bonds with the Native American birth father to whom she'd always been contentedly disconnected while painfullly coming to terms with her relationship with a woman she loves obsessively. Febos harnesses language, moods, actions, and settings with precision. A professor of creative writing, she stuns with sentences that are a credit to her craft and will no doubt inspire her readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)