Like many writers, Melissa Febos recognizes her book-hoarding tendencies. She knows hard choices must be made before a book earns a spot in her collection, which spans a campus office and several floors of her Iowa City home.
“Books are at the center of my life,” says Febos, the bestselling memoirist, Guggenheim Fellow, and University of Iowa writing professor. “One of the beautiful things about living in Iowa is you have more space.”
A few minutes spent in the upstairs library and writing room of her Iowa City home makes her priorities clear. The sunlit space contains a wall of floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with nonfiction (biographies, essays, memoirs, self-help) and, on another wall, a built-in cabinet full of the notebook diaries she’s filled by hand since she was a child.
“On these bookshelves are the books that are dearest to me and the books that I am currently using in my work or that I expect to be using soon,” Febos says. For her latest book, The Dry Season, which chronicles a year she spent celibate before meeting her wife, (the acclaimed poet Donika Kelly, who is now an UI associate professor of English)that meant gathering stories of artists throughout history for clues to how they balanced passion and their art.
Febos notes a few from the shelves: Savage Beauty, Nancy Milford’s biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay (“really just brimming with historical gossip, which is my favorite kind of biography”); Hermoine Lee’s biography, Virginia Woolf (“there’s so much beautiful writing about writing in there”); and Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Collette, by Judith Thurman (“one of the best biographies I’ve ever read”).
Because her library is also a workspace — Febos revised The Dry Season while walking on her treadmill desk — she says she keeps books that help “wind my artistic engine.” They include James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, and a dog-eared, underlined copy of Written on the Body, by Jeanette Winterson. “This book was kind of an awakening for me,” Febos says. “She’s the brainiest, sexiest writer I know of, and I was like, ‘Oh, I want to do that.’”
Both books are well-worn, with Febos’ mother’s old landline phone number scrawled inside the front cover of the latter. “I am a book annihilator,” Febos says. “The books I love best are destroyed. I don't live lightly in any way. I have relationships with books as objects in the way I have relationships with people — I interact with them a lot. I’m definitely not a person who puts them in a sleeve to save them.”
Books are a part of all of Febos’ relationships. Her wife Kelly’s hand can be seen in what alphabetical order there is on Febos’ shelves, like placingTara Westover’s memoir Educated next to Elissa Washuta’s memoir, White Magic (“one of the writers I love the most”).
“Everything I've ever learned in every relationship I've ever commenced has been at least partly based on the premise of the books that we love and that we share or that we want to argue over,” Febos says.
Standing before the shelves, Febos locates two of her most personal treasures. One is the book she stumbled across, drawn by its cover, in a Manhattan bookstore that launched the relationship with the person who became her wife in 2021.
“Here it is,” she says, pulling Kelly’s book, Bestiary, from a shelf. “(After buying it) I sat and read it in one sitting. At the end, I thought, ‘I need to meet this person.’ It wasn't a romantic thing. I was like, I need to meet the person behind this art because there's something really deep that I share with them.”
The two corresponded for months before meeting, getting to know each other as artists. On a shelf nearby is one of Febos’ other treasures — a poem Kelly surprised her with titled In the Beginning that sits in a silver frame ringed by flowers. “For M,” Kelly wrote at the top.
“She’s the most lovable person on the planet,” Febos says. The poem will be published in Kelly’s forthcoming collection, The Natural Order of Things.
Books were Febos' first love.
She grew up devouring them at the Falmouth, Massachusetts, public library, sometimes reading entire books after her mom dropped her off and writing down words she didn’t know in a notebook with a red velvet cover.
Febos still has some of her books from that era — E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (“It’s a beautifully written book — the sentences, you could just bounce a quarter off of them”) and Stuart Little (“It’s so whimsical — he falls in love with a bird”) and a boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia fantasy series by C.S. Lewis.
She doesn’t view books as investments, though, or collect first editions.
“My books are not worth anything to anyone else, but they are worth a lot to me,” she says. “I dog-ear and may leave books flat on the table — things that book collectors would just faint if they saw. I do have a deep, abiding love and respect for them; I think it just doesn't manifest as being careful with their glue.”
A small stack of books piled atop others on a shelf includes recent work from her Iowa colleagues — Space Struck, by Paige Lewis; Martyr!, by Kaveh Akbar; and Reproduction, by Louisa Hall. All three are also her neighbors in this quiet Iowa City neighborhood.
“I am the luckiest English professor in the world,” Febos says. “My colleagues are my best friends, and they're geniuses.” She effused, also, about the talents of her Nonfiction Writing Program colleagues—Tisa Bryant, Sarah Minor, Inara Verzemnieks, and John D’Agata. “I’m so lucky to be a part of this team.”
On a low, white, U-shaped table in the center of the room are six stacks of about 30 books. “This is the on-deck pile,” Febos says. “It’s sort of a managed chaos. There are books authors send me because they want blurbs, there are books that I dream of reviewing, there are books related to my projects.”
These include her former student Suleika Jaouad’s recently published The Book of Alchemy (“a great anthology of essays about journaling”) and Immodest Acts, by Judith C. Brown (“an extremely sexy book about this nun in Renaissance Italy”).
Being surrounded by books and making a living as a writer has been a lifelong dream for Febos.
“Books were my first, great love,” she says. “I aspire to be more of a minimalist person, but with books it's never happening.
“I have a fantasy of taking a whole sabbatical year one day just to catch up on reading.”
