Queer Voices Reading Group

This Pride Month, we will be discussing Melissa Febos' 2021 title Abandon Me, which explores her toxic relationship with another woman.

By booking onto this month's session, you are entitled to a complimentary place for Melissa Febos' upcoming event The Dry Season: Finding Pleasure in a Year Without Sex on the 27th June. Email bath@toppingbooks.co.uk to claim your place!

The Dry Season explores her life after the events of Abandon Me, and how she learnt to enjoy solitude and find comfort within herself.

In her dazzling Abandon Me, Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection - with family, lovers, and oneself. First, her birth father, who left her with only an inheritance of addiction and Native American blood, its meaning a mystery. As Febos tentatively reconnects, she sees how both these lineages manifest in her own life, marked by compulsion and an instinct for self-erasure. Meanwhile, she remains closely tied to the sea captain who raised her, his parenting ardent but intermittent as his work took him away for months at a time. Woven throughout is the hypnotic story of an all-consuming, long-distance love affair with a woman, marked equally by worship and withdrawal. In visceral, erotic prose, Febos captures their mutual abandonment to passion and obsession - and the terror and exhilaration of losing herself in another.

“An intricately constructed and emotionally devastating book about the appearance and disappearance of love. Febos is a strikingly talented writer who pushes at the boundaries of her form and shows us just how amazing and expansive it can be.” JENNY OFFILL