The author is not claiming to be unusual she is simply relaying how she felt. And, again, I sense something important both in Febos’s emphasis on a transcendent interior world (which she summons movingly) and in my own defensive recoil. This last image, which echoes an earlier description of Febos masturbating in the bathtub, exemplifies the sensual exultation of many such passages: Dillard “reeling” between books and life, Solnit hovering everywhere and nowhere, Trethewey heady with the rhythm of her father’s words. I would read or think or feel myself into a brimming state-not joy or sorrow, but some apex of their intersection, the raw matter from which each was made-then lie with my back to the ground, body vibrating, heart thudding, mind foaming, thrilled and afraid that I might combust, might simply die of feeling too much. Its channel was not always open, and what opened it was not always predictable: often songs and poems, a shaft of late-afternoon light, an unexpected pool of memory . . .

I sensed a deep well at my center, a kind of umbilical cord that linked me to a roiling infinity of knowledge and pathos that underlay the trivia of our daily lives. I emerged from whole afternoons of reading, my life a foggy half-dream through which I drifted as my self bled back into me like steeping tea.” She continues: “ Girlhood” is also the title of the third book of nonfiction by Melissa Febos, a writer and professor who has published two rigorous, intimate accounts of addiction and sex work, “ Whip Smart” and “ Abandon Me.” In her latest, Febos, whose view of youthful imagination might have fallen out of a Wordsworth poem, recalls her own early romance with words: “I was a magician with a single power: to disappear the world. This is girlhood- childhood-by its very nature. But, of course, every kid is an archer, a spy, a merperson, in her own padlocked brain. Growing up, we have unremitting access to our own thoughts and limited access to everyone else’s, and we can come to believe that only we were enthralled and transported by the mystery of existence. My reaction to the trope of the girl-dreamer might have to do with a tendency that I’m loath to recognize in myself: the assumption people make, based on the fact that they maintain an active fantasy life, that others don’t experience the world as intensely as they do.

(As kids, they were capable of exquisite emotional extremes and now, look, they’ve grown up to craft exquisite, lyrical books!) Sometimes, reading about the raptures of reading, I just feel tired.

The purpose of these scenes seems to be to conjure an idyll before the crush of adulthood, to heighten the ache of contrast they also seem designed, in part, to burnish the artistic credibility of the authors.

It is not solely female writers who linger over the first unfurling of their aesthetic sensitivities-see Nabokov in “ Speak, Memory,” Richard Wright in “ Black Boy”-but, somehow, the gesture feels especially fraught when women do it, when the motes of their selfhood are dissipating on the wind. the rhythm of language and the power of words to alter what I saw.” The visible world turned me curious to books the books propelled me reeling back to the world.” At the start of “ Memorial Drive,” Natasha Trethewey remembers “long walks with my father along the railroad tracks, the sounds of poetry he’d recite as I picked flowers or blackberries for my mother . . . I was a fog, a miasma, a mist.” In “ An American Childhood,” Annie Dillard recalls, “Everywhere, things snagged me. Rebecca Solnit, in “ Recollections of My Nonexistence,” writes that, as a girl, “when I read, I ceased to be myself, and this nonexistence I pursued and devoured like a drug. . . . For a certain type of memoirist, evoking the ecstasies of childhood imagination-and of childhood reading, especially-has become a station of the cross.

Poems about growing up for girls