Justine     Work     Press     About






Girlhood: Essays
by Melissa Febos
illustrated by Forsyth Harmon

Author of Abandon Me and Whip Smart, Melissa Febos's GIRLHOOD, a collection of essays about the patterns young women form during their childhoods and the way those patterns play out across their lifetimes, including sexuality, feminism, and reckoning with the history and perils of female embodiment, pitched in the vein of Reviving Ophelia and The Argonauts.

Forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2021.

Pre-order here ︎︎︎








“Girlhood is an exquisite collection. In lapidary, lucid prose, Melissa Febos dissects the traumas, terrors, and pleasures of the fraught passage from girl to woman. Febos's insight is devastating, the examinations of her world – from the female body, queerness, consent, slut-shaming, and intimacy – are rigorous and compassionate. This is a book for mothers, daughters, and our deepest selves, a true light in the dark.”
— Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter

“In this book, Febos proves herself to be one of the great documenters of the terrible and exquisite depths of girlhood. Here, that terrible and beautiful aeon is dissected, sung over, explored like ancient ruins. These essays are moss and iron-hard and beautiful-and struck through with Febos' signature brilliance and power and grace. An essential, heartbreaking project.”
— Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House