Book Recommendation: Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

Chauna Craig

Director/Professor

What's a book you would recommend to someone who wanted to learn more about your area of expertise?

My creative and scholarly work plays at the intersections of creative writing and literature by women and LGBTQ+ writers, especially novels and memoirs.

Melissa Febos’s Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative is a short book of essays that offers keen insights into the psychology of telling intimate stories, the dynamics of gender and sexuality in life writing, and the ways personal writing is inherently political.

I first read the book while waiting for a car repair, and Febos is such an accessible, compelling writer that I was never bored or impatient in the waiting room. She affirmed all the ways that writing about one’s own life is much more than the “navel-gazing” with which it is often dismissed. 

Chauna Craig is the director of the Cook Honors College. She is also a member of the English Department faculty, focusing on the 20th-century American novel, contemporary narrative, women’s literature, queer literature and theory, creative writing theory, and pedagogy.

Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

Melissa Febos

Catapult, 2022