“The story of the memoir is a story of me creating certain narratives so that I could live with my own experience and with the uneasy relationship between what I was doing and what I believed in - or what I saw as an uneasy relationship between those two things.” TwoStoriesCertainMy OwnSawsCreatingMemoirNarrativeTwo ThingsUneasy Author:Melissa Febos
“Fiction stymies me with its possibility. I can't see the bottom and I freeze, cling to the side, or just choke. In nonfiction, particularly that which takes personal narrative for its primary topic, I have a finite space and a finite amount of material. I can't fabricate material, I can only shape and burrow into it.” I CanSidesSpaceFictionPossibilityMaterialsAmountShapesBottomPrimariesNarrativeNonfictionTopicsFiniteChokeFreezeFabricate Author:Melissa Febos
“Our lives are a long series of acquiring and then sloughing narratives.” LongOur LivesSeriesNarrative Author:Melissa Febos
“I think we all are born inside of our parents' narratives. We stay there for a good while. We are taught their narratives about everything: their marriage, the world, God, gender, identity, etcetera. Then, at some point, our own narrative develops too much integrity to live inside that story. We don't ever fully escape it, but we move into our own stories.” ThinkingWorldStoriesMovingParentBornToo MuchIdentityTaughtIntegrityGenderNarrativeGender IdentityEtcetera Author:Melissa Febos
