Lessons Learned from "Body Work" by Melissa Febos
Body Work by Melissa Febos, feels akin to a sort of literary Talmud. This Hebrew term means “instruction” or “learning” and refers to a compilation of ancient disciplines regarded as sacred and moral by the Jewish people. The Talmud is seen as the centerpiece of Jewish cultural life serving as a guide for daily practices; it’s overall purpose– to teach. In this way, Body Work can can be read as observations, lessons in the alchemic experience writing offers to those who are ready to devote themselves fully to the craft.
An overarching question that dominates creative writing classrooms everywhere is that of: Can writing be taught? This question branches into other more specific inquiries about the making of art: Can style be taught? What about work ethic? Voice? Do we have to be innately talented, or is it possible to learn how to become a “good” writer?
Body Work beckons readers with its vibrant yellow glow, a blue languid body casually seated on the cover. It’s all very inviting. The blue body waits patiently for us as if to say, “I am here when you are ready.” And I believe that is part of the beautifully intense message of the book: One must be ready.
For a long period of time, Judaism had no temple. Likewise, one can argue writing has no temple either. To write, you show up with your history and your stories and you alone are responsible for transforming these experiences into art. In her introduction, Febos states: “These essays are attempts to describe the ways that writing is integrated into the fundamental movements of my life: political, corporeal, spiritual, psychological, and social” (xv). The impulse of the book is one of encouragement with the message that writing can and will bring you freedom, maybe even peace.
The book is organized in four sections: In Praise of Navel-Gazing, Mind Fuck: Writing Better Sex, A Big Shitty Party: Six Parables of Writing About Other People, and The Return: The Art of Confession. Rather than navigating through each one (please go read this book!), I’d like to share the parts that were invaluable to me personally and the lessons that have stuck with me and will continue to guide me in my own writing life.
1) There is no writer’s block, only fear
“I don’t mean to argue that writing personally is for everyone. What I’m saying is: don’t avoid yourself. The story that comes calling might be your own and it might not go away if you don’t open the door. I don’t believe in writer’s block. I only believe in fear. And you can be afraid and still write something.” (26).
A writer in a nonfiction workshop I’m currently leading asked our group a question the other night: “How can I write memoir without hurting anyone’s feelings?” I sort of lol’ed in my head, thinking Well, you can’t, but then pondered over how I would respond. It’s such a common question. I personally think that the person you hurt most in the act of writing is yourself. You go through the pain of it, of reliving and rehashing. Yes, other people can feel hurt by our writing (Febos discusses this not just in depth), and someone who writes about family, I have firsthand encounters with such hurt and backlash.
Febos mentions another version of this question along the lines of how she deals with the fallout of involving living people in her work. I agree with her sentiment here that as writers, we write the things we cannot speak, and therefore we write as our way of coping, understanding, coming to peace with. When we write in a way that avoids hurting anyone, it will not prove worthwhile. This is only a detriment to ourselves, to our work.
Sometimes our “writing blocks” are really just ourselves; our need for permission, our fear of others’ reactions to our work and how it might be received, our fear of not being validated by the work.
Febos urges us to push past these blocks, as we owe it to ourselves, and to the world, to write our stories out. I often remind myself of how much reading other people’s stories has helped me. I don’t know where I’d be without certain books, certain authors. It’s not easy to write yourself into the world, but it’s necessary to do so.
2) The beginning of resistance is the point which you must push past
“Over the years, I’ve come to look forward to the point in my own writing at which continuing seems both incomprehensible and loathsome. That resistance, rather than marking the dead end of the day’s words, marks the beginning of the truly interesting part.” (30).
Writer Stephen Pressfield in his book The War of Art defines resistance as fear, self-doubt, procrastination, perfectionism, all the forms of self-sabotage that stop us from doing our work and realizing our dreams. I’ve heard John Green speak of it in the form of a question, “What’s the point?” For me, it comes up as Who cares? Who’s going to read this anyway? Why does it matter?
At coffee with a new writer pal, we joked back and forth about imposter syndrome. She expressed that her debut novel didn’t feel like “real fiction” because it lives in the genre of Mystery. I offered that I feel my work is too lowbrow because I write about girls getting fingered and going to the mall. We are both valid in our feelings; but we’re also both wrong. We both encounter the enemy of resistance when we sit at our desks and type away our very different stories. But we also both press on and continue.
You have to kind of say “fuck you” to those feelings. Febos I’m sure would agree with me on this. The self-loathing and intrusive thoughts are real, but so is the willingness to keep going. There’s no trick, no magic to it. You just have to “punch through that false wall,” as Febos says.
3) Writing is a process of transformation
“This requires a different kind of rigor– in thinking, living, and creation. Whereas writing was once an exercise in transcription, it has become an exercise in transformation. I urge you to hold your own life and work to this higher standard.” (76).
Some may argue that writing is the opposite of therapeutic, that it dredges up old haunts and traumas and forces us to look them in the eye once again. Writing can, and does, re-open the wounds. But my own personal instinct has always led me back to the page after any kind of life event. Not even after; sometimes during.
When I was hospitalized for mental health reasons this past year, I sat in my hospital bed and wrote in my iPhone notes app. I didn’t think, Gee, this would make for a great essay, but my impulse was to document, to witness my own pain and turn it into something outside of myself. Maybe that’s selfish, but I find great worth in reading other stories of transformation, how someone was able to take the inevitable horror of life and shape it into something they could use.
Febos argues that writing can not only help us heal, but it can make us better people–better lovers, better partners, better friends.
I’ve heard Sheila Heti talk about the book as an object, how the writer must picture it as a radiating jewel floating midair waiting for you to write it into being. We transform our words into art and the art in turn transforms us. It makes us more human.
4) Writing can actually heal you
“The medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides writes in depth about the process of repentance in the Mishneh Torah. Teshuvah, the Hebrew word for this process, translates to ‘returning.’ He outlines it in three phases: stopping the action and resolving to change, relating to the past, and the act of confessing.” (115).
My absolute favorite section of Body Work is Febos’s penultimate discussion on the act of returning in writing. I have spent years in therapy learning about and dissecting my own trauma narrative, and so I deeply resonated with the idea that in order to heal, we have to acknowledge the entire arc of ourselves. We owe it to ourselves to complete the unfinished business of our lives. Paraphrasing here, but Febos states that we don’t have to have it all figured out in order to write about something. We only need to have a “change of heart,” a readiness to return to a truer version of ourselves– the one that can and will tell the story.
Febos states tenacity as the “most common characteristic of successful authors” (151). In order to fully integrate writing into our lives, we must fully incorporate ourselves into the act of writing. We must make it central to the way we live, “both external and internal,” thus making writing an impulse, an instinct– a natural response to life.
This ultimate return can look like many things for different people, but for Febos, this return is an act of worship in its own rite. It feels like forgiveness, redemption, love.
At a recent doctor’s visit, unrelated to mental health, the intake form asked if I wanted to declare a religious denomination. I wrote in Jewish and it felt like a very small form of return. There are still parts of myself that have not come full circle. There are so many essays I have yet to write because of fear, because of my own limitations. As a teacher, I believe that anyone can learn how to write if they really want to, and as a human, I believe that anyone can heal if they show up to the pain ready to be changed. But as a writer, I need books like Body Work, authors like Melissa Febos, to testify that they have done it, and so can I.
