Re-reading Whip Smart by Melissa Febos

“I know you. You’ve suffered, you’re worthy.” 

“What am I worthy of?” I ask.

“Of living! No one deserves to live if they haven’t suffered! And I certainly wouldn’t hang out with you if you hadn’t.” She says. 

She and I settled into female adulthood separately and differently. I’ve only begun to trust routines and she lives inside hers. The hard years sent me adrift and hers drove her into fulfilling dreams we had as younger, meaner versions of ourselves. There is a space between us now. Across it and in it, I often find myself unsure what to say next.  

She orders hot tea with soy milk and sugar she’s never heard of but must try. We order food. She chose the restaurant on a day when explosive diarrhea is all over the news.  

“Every dish comes with salad, but what about ED? ED, Books! Don’t you know about ED?! Have you read all about it?” she whispers through her teeth as the waiter turns away.  

“Yes, yes,” I say. “Don’t worry, I’ve been keeping an eye on the news. 

The tea arrives first. Its smell seems to sooths her panic. Then, she gets giddy, we turn to what we’ve been reading. 

For months, we kept up by texting reading lists. They are care packages, little demonstrations of “hey! this made me think of you.” 

She, too, is bookish. Her reading runs from the thinking woman’s rom-com to the prize-friendly abyss: sad Western European men, women who flirt with chaos and darkness and violence, then live alone in beautiful lyrical prose. Ambiguous endings piss her off. 

I’ve tried recommending her nonfiction and she’s literally sneered at me. Nonfiction is for school. And men. 

However, one of the other ones that I’ve re-read recently is Whip Smart, the debut memoir by Melissa Febos. And, because it involved dominating men, my brunch friend was satisfied with its back cover copy enough to make the purchase. 

16 years ago, I thought the book was an honest punch in the face. It still is. It’s one that makes you consider every pound of force, every nick of flesh. It’s a book I read on the subway and I felt vindicated for living in New York City. When I first read it, I was young and working in publishing. I aspired towards having a say in getting more of these stories into hands of other people so they can feel this exact feeling you feel right now. Putting the right book in somebody’s hands made me feel that I belonged to the city and to that world. 

16 years later, I still remember the dungeon and its cubicle claustrophobia, the coffin that doubled as a bondage table, how heroin and thoughts of her mother made her burp in a client’s face. I remember, too, how even the most incisively written and sexually frank memoirs can land in a conventional place and leave people at the margins.  

I read an interview where Febos said, “When I wrote my first book, the factor of caring what people thought about me was much more present, and simultaneously, I had a strong drive to name things that weren’t polite or easy. It was very important for me to frame that book in intellectual terms and also not to flinch from the more explicit aspects.” (Dawson, “Vulnerability Is the Hardest, Bravest Place to Go”). That tension – the need for an intellectual frame and the refusal to flinch – was part of what I first admired. 

I don’t tell my brunch friend, but re-reading Whip Smart is like seeing her after nine months. The grittiness, syntactical elegance, directness, confessions are all still there. But I am not the same reader. 

In the book’s hard-won intelligence, I can now see an undercurrent I missed: contempt. 

On this rereading, I meet Bella for the first time. She has always been in the memoir. Now she is a glaring beacon of what-the-fuck. 

I remember skimming over her. I was used to ignoring characters like this since I worked for an industry that accepted this. I was exhausted and frequently ignored my recoil.  

Bella is thirty-two and Chinese American.  Her speech drops L’s like Mickey Rooney’s character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s:  “arr,” “sreep”, “wirr”. During a client session, the racialized sexual patter: “sranted yerrow,” “srobbering,” and “rittle.” 

It’s a sound effect that tells the reader how to hear her, a short cut leading us into caricature that I can’t invent a purpose for. Is she supposed to be comic relief? 

The narration supplies racialized imagery ia way that feels motivated, though the motivation remains unspoken. Bella can “pass for a preadolescent” and has a “child’s body.” She is an adult woman at work, rendered as an eroticized child. In terms of her aspirations, she reads The Rules. In terms of her work, she has a “mechanical thrust of her arm,” and gives the impression that she might be “reading aloud a car manual,” confirming her utter “lack of interest in her methods.”  She is sexually available to the scene, but barely legible as a person with desires, ambitions, or life beyond it. 

Bella can rest of on the laurels of her fetishized Asian body. 

We can call this empowerment. Bella’s detachment may read as coolness, steady gaze of disdain. But isn’t she also there to make the male clients’ infantilizing, racist desires disgusting, turning their ugliness back on them and on the reader? Febos only calls it as she sees it.  

Amy Sueyoshi in Discriminating Sex discusses how Chinese and Japanese people were collapsed into a pan-Asian figure saturated with sexual and gendered fantasy. Bella is Chinese American, but the client needs an interchangeable Asian woman, small enough to infantilize. A step further, she’s naturally endowed with fetish value while the white women who work in the dungeon don’t get that privilege. White women have to work to become convincing fetishes; Bella only has to exist. “After only Mistress Bella’s example,” Febos describes her discomfort and overwhelming sensory experience when she is first tasked with a client. Bella is a fetish; Febos has to work to become one.   

I cannot say how other Asian American women read Bella. I know I kept going. For years, I treated that discomfort as part of literary taste. Side characters could not interrupt a narrative I knew was brave, sharp and full of raw truths about recovery and self-realization. 

When Bella speaks, the other women leave mid-sentence. She is accepted, but no one really likes her.  

She fits into the dungeon like a DEI department the company didn’t want. She functions as set dressing and stark contrast. And she disappears after Lena recommends Justine take a client who Bella no-showed. The rest of Febos’s story recovers, softens, is tied up nicely and Febos continued with more nonfiction in her exceptional canon. 

Febos’s last line is a showstopper, the kind of line that makes you feel like you just took a vacation to hell but now you’re barreling towards a new phase of life, a brand new house: “I still had dreams – I would for a long time. But I didn’t miss the best part – that feeling of pressing up against the barest parts of being human. I’d thought I had to look for it in dark places, that it would be hidden. Turns out it wasn’t.” Gorgeous and simple, it lets us know she’s safe and now we can feel safe too. 

On my second reading, I’m still back in the dungeon, wondering how much of Bella’s humanity I was supposed to leave there. And why. 

In the end, a memoir may tell one person’s truth without being responsible for the representational ethics of everyone in its frame.  Who cares about Bella anyway? She reads the Rules. 

My brunch friend doesn’t like Whip Smart. She started it and it’s too chockfull full of another ED: erectile dysfunction. It’s a memoir that confirms what my brunch friend has known all along: that men who go to dungeons forfeit their personhood, so why would she care at all?

Then the food arrives. 

The waiter brings her plate and mine. His smile melts into our omelets when my friend’s eyes open wide. “The plate is full of ED! Don’t touch it, Books! There’s ED everywhere… push it to the side or you’ll get ED! ED will ruin your fucking life.”

I love this brunch friend, which is not a terrible thing.  

I care for her so I do not eat the greens on my plate. After overseeing my greens’ proper segregation, she absentmindedly eats her own. I don’t warn her when she takes her first bite. I shiver with worry. I dread what her spitting or swallowing under these conditions might be like.  I keep my eyes on my own plate and not imagine ED. Perhaps she won’t notice. 

But then, her half-eaten salad and her tea are cleared. She exclaims, “I ate the salad! I taste it! I’m going to get ED!”  

I could’ve warned her. Immediately I feel guilt. 

But just as suddenly, through a coin-sized break in reality, I see the rest of the restaurant: people eating salad. They are calm. She is not. 

What string of words gets me and my friend back to talking about life and stories, sharing the depository of non-ED shit that makes us laugh? 

I care about her.  I assure her she won’t get ED and if she does, it won’t be the end of the world. That upsets her even more. 

“I even told you not to eat yours! I forced you! And now I definitely have it.”  

My omelet is cold and barely eaten as I motion for them to take it away. The peppery greens are doused in something citrusy and faintly spicy, meant to cut the creaminess of the egg. They are invisible now. I contained them under an overturned butter dish. She applauds my cleverness. Without the salad, the omelet is bland and heavy. The crusty bread can’t compensate. It tastes of disappointment, slightest oppression, mostly sadness. 

I know the restaurant wants us gone. I care only about our small table, shaking with the potential of ED. I want to hug my friend as she weeps. But I stay on my side of the table. We’ve been here before and any move will make her recoil.

She’s tough as hell. Nothing I say matters when she might have ED and the world is over. 

A memory crinkles to the surface. At brunch after her breakup years ago, she said to me: “You’re Asian. Guys love Asians. Look at me, though. I’m just normal. It’s harder for me.” 

She might deny saying that now, but I doubt it. She believed it and that’s how we functioned. 

She needed an explanation for pain. Most of the time it’s men but when I’m not suffering, it’s my race. My choices were stories at brunch: recklessness made entertaining, suffering made truth, abuses made funny I was a category of presumed access and therefore a person whose hurt could be made less serious, more convenient. 

This was my suffering self. To my brunch friend, I was less insufferable then. 

She buys a lot of books. She reads them. And she has a hard, well-respected, hard-earned job. I know these things about her. I know there is more to her than this brunch and other, much worse brunches and much nicer ones too. 

Now the waiter is scooting us out of the restaurant. He does it with a smile; he needs our table. 

She is still my friend. Febos is still a killer writer who teaches other writers, by example, how to use people as set dressing. My friend will read fiction that confirms the world is shit and the world, in turn, will be shit. 

There are ways to make a person’s pain disappear while remaining very serious about suffering and self-realization and recovery. Whoever narrates has authority, while someone else’s personhood becomes background. I read past a woman whose treatment might have interrupted my admiration. 

Forty years into making stories out of my life, I’m now noticing what was left out so I could move on.  

Who suffers more is irrelevant. I hid the greens because she was frightened and I wanted to help. I also let her fear decide what I could eat. There was care in that, and capitulation. 

Keep reading, keep listening, unhide the greens. 

That’s why my omelet sucked at brunch. There was suffering and no one got diarrhea.