Reviewed by Anna Rollins
Freak Lip: Volume 5: Essays of the Unsaid
by Julia Cohen
TEXAS REVIEW PRESS
November 2026, Paperback, 137 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1680034240
The first sentence that goes unsaid in Julia Cohen’s Freak Lip: Essays of the Unsaid is this: “I got my period.” This fact, never uttered, “wilts like a bird covered in coal dust, a negative velocity.” Cohen contextualizes her shame: she is not in a family plagued with religious guilt, she has not internalized a morality that prohibits sexuality. Her household was “flush with acceptance but little privacy.” She simply didn’t want to shift the way she was experienced by others. She did not fear the change; she feared the unanticipated response.
Cohen begins the narrative with the image of a silver-grey drawstring bag containing her bloodied underwear. She keeps this bag of bloodied underwear hidden in a paper mache Snoopy mask, a craft she made as a kid. The underwear sit for so long that maggots begin chewing their way through the blood and cotton. Eventually, she buries the contents of the bag near oaks, acorns, skunk cabbage, dry dirt, and crabapple trees on the acreage close to her childhood home. This, she writes, was an act of trying to “create a sentence outside [herself].” Eventually, though, her budding sexuality is recognized by her mother and celebrated with an “I Got My Period” cake.
Cohen’s book is as much about the body as it is about sentences. The trapped kind. To parse through her experiences of shame and embodiment, Cohen references the work of Gertrude Stein. Cohen is introduced to Stein’s work in college, and she is immediately drawn to her because she is one of the “few writers who feels her way through a sentence without trying to affix a set meaning to her experience.” She describes feeling both love and jealousy toward Stein’s ability to craft a sentence, “feelings, like baby foxes making their way out of the dark den into the clover.” She wonders, later, when Stein started menstruating, and if she and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, shared the same period cycle.
Cohen writes of Stein’s observation that recognition always leads to limitation. Memory, too, functions like a corset. Both lead to restrictive relationships in the way one can continue to embody the self. Or, in Cohen’s words: “Language crystallizes into a crisp divide between bodies. How an unsaid sentence trenches, existing both as the moat & the drawbridge sealed tight.”
The book’s title is a reference to the narrator overhearing a group of boys making fun of a girl’s body: she had a third labia, and they referred to it as her “freak lip.” Cohen writes, “accidental eavesdropping turns to fear of having the parts of my body that should attract sexual attention cause repulsion.” This, the fear of having something recognized that she had not identified as shameful, limits her freedom and imagination. She begins looking at her body and tries to clock the ways it could be mocked, bracing herself for judgment in moments of peak vulnerability.
At age sixteen, Cohen visits an OBGyn who tells her, after a pelvic exam, that she’d be lucky to get a pinkie inside of her. Her vaginal walls are reported as too tight. When Cohen goes to the doctor and is unable to have a pelvic exam due, the doctor reports this to Cohen’s mother who responds with care and concern. Cohen is given a list of measures to take to remedy the issue – but she buries the shame of her clenched body by turning inward still. She states, “I’ve never used tampons. Touch my fingertips to the window. Look out & see the maples blurring into a green season that feels nothing like me. I point at nothing. Everything is outside”
Inhibited by her physical limits, she envies the sexual freedom of her peers and pushes relationships away just as they get a bit too close. She lies to friends about having lost her virginity by tossing out a vague and fictionalized story about it happening in the backseat of a car.
For the next near-decade, she keeps her shame private; but even after her body finally yields enough to surrender to desire, her fear that she is inadequate and prone to disappointment, hovers over every syllable of her account.
A meditation on embodiment, desire, and the ineffability of language, Cohen braids scenic vignettes, text message transcripts, and literary theory with mesmerizing sensuality. She parses her insecurities covertly in iPhone transcripts where she narrates existential feelings, attachments, her own favorite body parts, and her dislike (the word “dick” is used) of Jonathan Franzen. The entire collection probes the secrets bodies hold close, the truths better realized in the world than in words.
About the reviewer: Anna Rollins’ memoir, Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl, examines the rhyming scripts of evangelical purity culture and diet culture. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, Electric Literature, Joyland Magazine, NBCNews THINK, HuffPost Personal, Newsweek, and other outlets. She is an award-winning instructor who taught English in higher education for nearly 15 years and a 2025 West Virginia Creative Network Literary Arts Fellow.