Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

by Melissa Febos

I don’t believe in writer’s block. I only believe in fear. And you can be afraid and still write something. No one has to read it, though when you’re done, you might want them to. One of the epigraphs of my second book—though it could be an epigraph for my life—is a quote from the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott: “It is joy to be hidden and disaster not to be found.”

We think love will redeem us, and it will, but not that of any human lover and not that of any material substance. I have found a church in art, a form of work that is also a form of worship—it is a means of understanding myself, all my past selves, and all of you as beloved.