Melissa Febos

  • culture March 08, 2022

    Change of Art

    There is a conventional wisdom about memoir that claims a writer must have sufficient hindsight in order to write meaningfully about her past. This has not been my experience. All that has been required of me to write about something is this change of heart. A shift toward, or away, or perhaps a desire to return to some truer version of myself. I don’t even have to know that I’ve made it, but when I look back at the beginnings of everything I’ve ever written, there it is. 

    I recently reread Natasha Trethewey’s exquisite memoir, Memorial Drive, in which she explores her mother’s murder by an

  • culture October 09, 2013

    Elect H. Mouse State Judge by Nelly Reifler

    When members of a cult kidnap a mouse's two daughters, the rodent knows just who can help: Ken and Barbie. Welcome to Nelly Reifler's seedy and crime-ridden world of lost toys. With an off-kilter and plastic cast of characters, Nelly Reifler delivers something quite surprising—a convincing portrait of humanity.

    In Nelly Reifler’s new novel, we’re introduced to a diminutive protagonist with a good heart and a robust furry belly. A widower, and, yes, a mouse, H. Mouse loves his two daughters, Susie and Margo, with a profound and sometimes melancholy adoration. His campaign for State Judge, based on his generous philosophy that “we are, each of us, born in a state of grace and innocence,” has strong public support. In darker moments, though, when his past slips out from the shadows, it is hard for H to include himself in his belief “that no matter what someone may do, even if it causes great harm, it is

  • syllabi January 06, 2010

    Graphic Lives

    By marrying the intimacy of autobiography with the aesthetic eclecticism of the graphic novel, graphic memoirs occupy the fertile realm between fiction and nonfiction, as well as between literature and art. I first encountered this narrative chimera in the 1990s, when I read Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World, and the feminist zines I found along the windowsills of Boston’s indie bookstores. This underground aesthetic seemed to depict my own disaffected experience and burgeoning politics; since then, I’ve been glad to see long-form graphic storytelling find a larger audience. The following volumes