Melissa Febos: Whip Smart and the Dominatrix Memoir

Melissa Febos is an American writer who lives in Iowa and is a full professor in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. For readers who know BDSM and fetish writing, her name started with the memoir Whip Smart. The book covers her years as a professional dominatrix while she was at The New School. In August 1999 she entered The New School and moved to New York. The work keeps returning to power, the body, queer life, and the ethics of telling sexual stories. The clients in that domination are paying adults. The scenes are not a tutorial, and they are not a child’s game.

She grew up in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Her father was a sea captain and her mother was a therapist. At sixteen, after passing the GED, she left home for Boston and worked as a boatyard hand and a chambermaid. She took night courses at Harvard Extension School, then enrolled at The New School and settled in New York in August 1999. She later earned an MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. Those credentials frame Whip Smart as a dungeon memoir and as literary nonfiction, not as tabloid confession.

From the dungeon to the prize lists

Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press, 2010, ISBN 9780312583781) is the book that made her known. It goes into session detail, gear, client psychology, and the addiction running under paid power exchange. It lays out the economics of professional domination in New York in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the double life of a student in class by day and a paid mistress at night. That frankness put her on the cover of the New York Post and onto NPR’s Fresh Air, CNN’s Dr. Drew, and Anderson Cooper’s talk show.

Later books widen the shelf. The lyric essay collection Abandon Me (Bloomsbury, 2017, ISBN 9781632866585) was a Lambda Literary Award finalist and a Publishing Triangle Award finalist. The New Yorker called it mesmerizing and wrote of its fearlessness. The essays take up attachment, family, and erotic abandon. Girlhood (Bloomsbury, 2021, ISBN 9781635572520) was a national bestseller and won the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. The New York Times placed it in a feminist canon with Adrienne Rich and Maggie Nelson — smart, radical company, and not ordinary at all. In that book Febos listens to other women’s stories and still anchors them in the history of her own body.

Craft, teaching, and queer life

In 2022 she published Body Work (Catapult, ISBN 9781646220854), a craft book on writing the body and the self. It is aimed at writers who want sex, trauma, and desire on the page without silence and without exploitation. It was a national bestseller and a Los Angeles Times bestseller.

Febos identifies as queer. Her wife is the poet Donika Kelly. She has spoken publicly about being bullied as a child and about rethinking harm that had been treated as normal. That talk is about injury, not a sex scene. With Rebecca Keith she co-curated the Mixer Reading and Music series on the Lower East Side for ten years. She is a four-time MacDowell Colony fellow and has held residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Vermont Studio Center, among others. Essays have won awards from Prairie Schooner and StoryQuarterly. She served for five years on the board of Vida: Women in Literary Arts. Her bylines include The New York Times, The Paris Review, and Vogue.

Her teaching runs through SUNY Purchase, Gotham Writers’ Workshop, and NYU, and now the Iowa professorship. The Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Literature Fellowship, and Lambda’s Jeanne Córdova Prize sit on the same record. Readers first met her as the dominatrix memoirist. The later jobs and prizes are the literary institutions that followed the dungeon book.