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Girlhood
- Narrated by: Melissa Febos
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
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Publisher's summary
Bloomsbury presents Girlhood by Melissa Febos, read by Melissa Febos.
A gripping set of stories about the forces that shape girls and the adults they become. A wise and brilliant guide to transforming the self and our society.
In her powerful new book, critically acclaimed author Melissa Febos examines the narratives women are told about what it means to be female and what it takes to free oneself from them.
When her body began to change at 11 years old, Febos understood immediately that her meaning to other people had changed with it. By her teens, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong. Over time, Febos increasingly questioned the stories she’d been told about herself and the habits and defences she’d developed over years of trying to meet others’ expectations. The values she and so many other women had learned in girlhood did not prioritise their personal safety, happiness or freedom, and she set out to reframe those values and beliefs.
Blending investigative reporting, memoir and scholarship, Febos charts how she and others like her have reimagined relationships and made room for the anger, grief, power and pleasure women have long been taught to deny.
Written with Febos’s characteristic precision, lyricism and insight, Girlhood is a philosophical treatise, an anthem for women and a searing study of the transitions into and away from girlhood, towards a chosen self.
Critic reviews
"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’ 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 and Her Body and Other Parties)
"Melissa Febos is part poet, part theorist and all writer. In this lyrical, searching, profound and personal collection, Febos examines childhood, femaleness and love in its many forms with a sensuous ferocity that is all her own." (Ariel Levy, author of The Rules Do Not Apply and Female Chauvinist Pigs)
Featured Article: The top 100 memoirs of all time
All genres considered, the memoir is among the most difficult and complex for a writer to pull off. After all, giving voice to your own lived experience and recounting deeply painful or uncomfortable memories in a way that still engages and entertains is a remarkable feat. These autobiographies, often narrated by the authors themselves, shine with raw, unfiltered emotion sure to resonate with any listener. But don't just take our word for it—queue up any one of these listens, and you'll hear exactly what we mean.
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Scars and Stilettos: At 13, after being abandoned by her mother one summer and left to take care of her younger brother, Harmony becomes susceptible to a relationship that turns out to be toxic, abusive, and ultimately exploitative. She eventually finds herself working in a strip club at the age of 19, and her boyfriend becomes her pimp, controlling her every move and taking all of her money. Ultimately, she discovers a path to freedom and a whole new life.
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A religious book
- By Amazonbuyer on 10-12-21
By: Harmony Dust
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Before You Knew My Name
- A Novel
- By: Jacqueline Bublitz
- Narrated by: Penelope Rawlins
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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When she arrived in New York on her 18th birthday carrying nothing but $600 cash and a stolen camera, Alice Lee was looking for a fresh start. Now, just one month later, she is the city’s latest Jane Doe. She may be dead, but that doesn’t mean her story is over. Meanwhile, Ruby Jones is also trying to reinvent herself. After travelling halfway around the world, she’s lonelier than ever in the Big Apple. Until she stumbles upon a woman’s body by the Hudson River and suddenly finds herself unbreakably tied to the unknown dead woman.
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Excellent
- By cristina on 11-11-22
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Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?
- Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform
- By: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
- Narrated by: Mark Bachman
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Gay culture has become a nightmare of consumerism, whether it's an endless quest for Absolut vodka, Diesel jeans, rainbow Hummers, pec implants, or Pottery Barn. Whatever happened to sexual flamboyance and gender liberation, an end to marriage, the military, and the nuclear family? As backrooms are shut down to make way for wedding vows, and gay sexual culture morphs into “straight-acting dudes hangin’ out”, what are the possibilities for a defiant faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle?
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Forget the Status Quo South Beach B.S.
- By Susie on 03-14-13
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Michael Henry Heim - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
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A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being."
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Love, Politics, and Strange Bedfellows
- By Mel on 07-01-12
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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The Years
- By: Annie Ernaux
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges.
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Mixed Feelings
- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
By: Annie Ernaux
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My Body
- By: Emily Ratajkowski
- Narrated by: Emily Ratajkowski
- Length: 5 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Emily Ratajkowski is an acclaimed model and actress, an engaged political progressive, a formidable entrepreneur, a global social media phenomenon, and now, a writer. Rocketing to world fame at age 21, Ratajkowski sparked both praise and furor with the provocative display of her body as an unapologetic statement of feminist empowerment. The subsequent evolution in her thinking about our culture’s commodification of women is the subject of this book.
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so vain..
- By Emily Valdez on 01-10-22
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Who Killed My Father
- By: Édouard Louis
- Narrated by: Edouard Louis
- Length: 1 hr and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Who Killed My Father rips into France’s long neglect of the working class and its overt contempt for the poor, accusing the complacent French - at the minimum - of negligent homicide. The author goes to visit the ugly gray town of his childhood to see his dying father, barely 50 years old, who can hardly walk or breathe: “You belong to the category of humans whom politics consigns to an early death.” It’s as simple as that.
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Powerful. Poetic. Sparse. Piercing.
- By Theophile Jones on 06-01-23
By: Édouard Louis
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Myra Breckinridge
- A Novel (Myra and Myron, Book 1)
- By: Gore Vidal, Camille Paglia - introduction
- Narrated by: Michelle Hendley, Camille Paglia
- Length: 6 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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"I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess." So begins the irresistible testimony of the luscious instructor of Empathy and Posture at Buck Loner's Academy of Drama and Modeling. Myra has a secret that only her surgeon shares; a passion for classic Hollywood films, which she regards as the supreme achievements of Western culture; and a sacred mission to bring heteronormative civilization to its knees. Fifty years after its first publication unleashed gales of laughter, delight, and ferocious dissent, Myra's moment to instruct and delight has once again arrived.
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Well performed
- By Kenny D on 06-08-19
By: Gore Vidal, and others
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The Complete Stories
- By: Clarice Lispector, Katrina Dodson, Benjamin Moser
- Narrated by: full cast
- Length: 22 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Here, gathered in one volume, are the stories that made Clarice a Brazilian legend. Originally a cloth edition of 86 stories, now we have 89 in all, covering her whole amazing career, from her teenage years to her deathbed. In these pages, we meet teenagers becoming aware of their sexual and artistic powers, humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies, old people who don't know what to do with themselves - and in their stories, Clarice takes us through their lives - and hers - and ours.
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Wonderful Collection
- By XX on 04-25-20
By: Clarice Lispector, and others
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The Odd Woman and the City
- A Memoir
- By: Vivian Gornick
- Narrated by: Vivian Gornick
- Length: 4 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same.
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Yet another Gornick masterpiece
- By Lo on 01-14-23
By: Vivian Gornick
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Pages for You
- The Pages for You Series, Book 1
- By: Sylvia Brownrigg
- Narrated by: Abby Craden
- Length: 6 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
In a steam-filled diner in a college town, Flannery Jansen catches sight of something more beautiful than she's ever seen: a graduate student, reading. The 17-year-old, new to everything around her - college, the East Coast, bodies of literature, and the sexual flurries of student life - is shocked by her desire to follow this wherever it will take her.
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A gorgeous listen
- By MissLynn on 03-09-20
By: Sylvia Brownrigg
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The Sum of Our Days
- By: Isabel Allende
- Narrated by: Blair Brown, Isabel Allende
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of the tragic death of her daughter, Paula. Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom, this remarkable memoir is as exuberant and as full of life as its creator. Allende bares her soul while sharing her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory - and recounts stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her and lovingly embraces as a new kind of family.
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She does not disappoint
- By ChiChi's Rule on 06-01-22
By: Isabel Allende
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Ordinary Light
- A Memoir
- By: Tracy K. Smith
- Narrated by: Tracy K. Smith
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Tracy K. Smith has a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be Black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.
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Simply spoken - poetic
- By CarolynneRHarris on 04-27-15
By: Tracy K. Smith
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This journey is captivating to say the least!
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A must!!!
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A modern American psycho but British
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Jayne and June Baek are nothing alike. June’s three years older, a classic first-born, know-it-all narc with a problematic finance job and an equally soulless apartment (according to Jayne). Jayne is an emotionally stunted, self-obsessed basket case who lives in squalor, has egregious taste in men, and needs to get to class and stop wasting Mom and Dad’s money (if you ask June). Once thick as thieves, these sisters who moved from Seoul to San Antonio to New York together now don’t want anything to do with each other. That is, until June gets cancer.
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The narrator of Assembly is a Black British woman. She is preparing to attend a lavish garden party at her boyfriend’s family estate, set deep in the English countryside. At the same time, she is considering the carefully assembled pieces of herself. As the minutes tick down and the future beckons, she can’t escape the question: Is it time to take it all apart?
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Born in a bathtub in 1954 to a white mother and a Cherokee father, Betty Carpenter is the sixth of eight siblings. The world they inhabit in the rural town of Breathed, Ohio, is one of poverty and violence—both from outside the family and, devastatingly, from within. But despite the hardships she faces, Betty is resilient. Her curiosity about the natural world, her fierce love for her sisters, and her father’s brilliant stories are kindling for the fire of her own imagination, and in the face of all to which she bears witness, Betty discovers an escape: she begins to write.
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Well
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For reasons of her own, Hero Tojosoa accepts an invitation she was half expected to decline, and finds herself in Prague on a bachelorette weekend hosted by her estranged friend Sofie. Little does she know she’s arrived in a city with a penchant for playing tricks on the unsuspecting. A book Hero has brought with her seems to be warping her mind: the text changes depending on when it’s being listened to and who’s doing the listening, revealing startling new stories of fictional Praguers past and present.
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Narrator’s Czech accent sounds like a low budget Dracula
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Easy Beauty
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So begins Chloé Cooper Jones’s bold, revealing account of moving through the world in a body that looks different than most. Jones learned early on to factor “pain calculations” into every plan, every situation. Born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis which affects both her stature and gait, her pain is physical. But there is also the pain of being judged and pitied for her appearance, of being dismissed as “less than.”
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Understanding Disabilities Increased
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Luster
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Edie is stumbling her way through her 20s - sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She is also haltingly, fitfully giving heat and air to the art that simmers inside her. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage - with rules.
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Spellbinding
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What listeners say about Girlhood
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- C. J. Smith
- 09-05-21
Thoughtful essays on growing up
Febos' narratives about becoming self aware are transformative and loving. The writing is exquisite. I'll definitely listen/read again!
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- RCB
- 03-30-22
Compelling
She's been through it. Worth a listen, for sure. Could have trimmed the essays in a few places.
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- St Clair
- 06-27-21
Spot on for many of us
Provocative. A salve for other academics with histories. (I enjoy the author’s narration also. It’s always good to hear the author read)
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2 people found this helpful
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- carissa
- 04-20-21
Great Book but Audio is Choppy
I really enjoyed listening to this book. It always is nice listening to the author read it because I can get more of a sense of what they meant when they wrote it. I did have to stop quite often because much of it does hit deep wounds for those whom identify as female. We all have experienced much of what she speaks about in this book, so personally, I needed time away to process and self-reflect on what the words mean in my life and process what wounds I still have left unhealed that the book opens up. Melissa gives voice to feelings many women are unable to give voice to, like "empty consent,"
The audio was very choppy in the first few chapters. I almost stopped the book altogether and returned it because it was so bad with the repeats and weird cut-offs. After about Chapter 7 or 8 it stopped being choppy.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Dav-chat-m
- 05-28-23
Breathtaking.
This collection of essays gutted me. I felt seen. Melissa Febos is a literary genius who is able to distill experience into the most beautiful prose.
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- pat
- 04-23-22
Enlightening
I heard Melissa Febos interviewed on NPR & was so impressed with her awareness of how difficult it is to come into relationship with our own body. Her sensitivity to the human psyche, especially related to our sexuality, body, and the big picture of the world we live in related to all the above are difficult to have awareness about much less to be able to bring light and understanding to. Thank you for helping me as a man understand better my own self body hatred and also my behavior sexually. I hope to be much more aware of my wife’s needs and listen and encourage her more to know herself, and be my guide.
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- Franky
- 12-26-22
Another critical read for anyone who’s cares about women’s rights and freedom
I really hope all women, and men, for that matter, find this book. The stories about how women are taught to move through a patriarchal and sexist world are so eye opening. I wish my younger self would have heard these stories, along with the freedom found within them. I wish my Mother and all the women in my life heard these, too. Beautifully written, thoughtful, vulnerable and educational.
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- Amazon Customer
- 06-22-23
a sense of clarity
been going through a very toxic breakup and this collection of essays helped me so much with realizing why i need to end it (along with being beautifully written and incredibly raw).
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- Michael Odlyzko
- 03-08-22
Gut punchy memoir and polemic
I was pretty gripped by one of these essays when adapted for NYT, the whole book is engaging too but really also more dense, heart wrenching, and polemical than that. Lots of unpalatable but worthwhile food for thought as a politically/culturally ambivalent, religious, straight, white dad. Always appreciate hearing an author read and speak for themselves as here.
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- Taylor Fowler
- 01-17-24
Absolutely stunning.
Writing like this makes me so grateful that I started reading for pleasure again. What I would have missed out on from this essay if I hadn’t! Thank you for sharing yourself with us.
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