Dale steadies his vessel for a conversation with acclaimed author, Melissa Febos. Abandon Me, Melissa’s recently-released collection of personal essays, describes her life growing up as the daughter of a sea captain and the ways in which those early days of longing for a loved one affected her relationships later in life. Melissa and Dale share a great deal in common, from their working-class backgrounds to a similar outlook on faith and a shared love of early Peter Jackson films. Both Dale and Melissa have spent time investigating personas and the two talk about what it means to disappear almost entirely into one’s invented self. Dale reveals that he was greatly moved by particular passages in the book, especially those dealing with the struggle between loneliness and the desire to be left alone. Abandon Me is full of compassion, humor, humility, and lots of perfectly deployed references to the sea, things that are always welcome in the Deep Night.
Melissa Febos is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press 2010) and the essay collection, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury 2017). Her work has been widely anthologized and appears in publications including Tin House, Granta, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Glamour, Guernica, Post Road, Salon, The New York Times, Hunger Mountain, Portland Review, Dissent, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, Bitch Magazine, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Drunken Boat, and Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York. She has been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air, CNN, Anderson Cooper Live, and elsewhere. Her essays have twice received special mention from the Best American Essays anthology and have won prizes from Prairie Schooner, Story Quarterly, and The Center for Women Writers. The recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Monmouth University and MFA faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA).
You can purchase Abandon Me wherever books are sold including this online retailer. But you can also support your local bookstore, cause those folks are terrific.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 54:21 — 34.4MB)
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Pandora | RSS
