When a Writer’s Great Freedom Lies in Constraint
By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Karl Ove Knausgaard, George Saunders, Emma Donoghue, Michael Chabon, and more.
Artistic freedom, paradoxically, relies on the presence of constraints. Expression somehow flourishes when it has rules, norms, and conventions to push against—or as William Wordsworth once wrote of the sonnet’s rigid form, “the prison into which we doom ourselves / no prison is.” But Melissa Febos, the author of Abandon Me, takes this a step further. Her entire working ethos is about willingly, even willfully, imposing limits—and not just on the page. In a conversation for this series, Febos explored how an essay by Annie Dillard inspires her to pursue only one thing, deeply, at a time, and why she’ll always choose to restrict the total number of choices in her life.
A desire for single-mindedness powers Febos’s artistic pursuits, but she knows that very impulse—to be not just preoccupied, but obsessed and consumed—can be destructive, too, as we discussed. That’s a central concern of , a memoir in eight connected essays. The book starts by exploring her relationship to an absent father—“abandon,” as in . But it’s also about another sense of the verb—“abandon,” to give oneself recklessly and completely. From
