In 2016, bestselling memoirist Melissa Febos made a resolution to be celibate for three months. She knew that for many people this would not be particularly difficult or a daunting proposition—or even something they would think of as a choice. But for her it was a substantial change.
At 35, following the devastating end of the toxic romance that is the subject of her sophomore outing, the Lambda Literary Award finalist Abandon Me, it would be her longest period of abstinence since early adolescence. And that was before she expanded the time frame from three months to six.
Nine years later, this experience serves as the basis of The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex, coming from Knopf in June. “At the time, the whole thing felt sort of embarrassing,” Febos says, speaking via Zoom from the treadmill desk in her sun-drenched, bookshelf-lined home office in Iowa City. “I didn’t even really want to talk about it too much. I had no idea I was going to write about it.”
Indeed, Febos says she never knows she’s going to write about an experience while she’s in the midst of it. “I think it always sounds sort of inconceivable when I say that,” she says. “But I’m the queen of hiding the obvious from myself. I have to, so that I can live my truth without engaging the stenographer inside my brain too heavily.”
Now 44 and with four books under her belt, Febos is a disarming combination of casual, charismatic, and confident over Zoom. Her raven hair is pulled back, her striking blue eyes are framed by clear plastic glasses, and she’s wearing what she explains is a semi-ironic sweatshirt that reads simply, “SPORTS.”
Though she never conceives of her present moment as fodder for a future book, Febos has been a devoted diarist since her childhood in Falmouth, Mass., where she was raised by her therapist mother and her adoptive father, a sea captain. “As a kid, I sensed that there were parts of myself that were less acceptable or comfortable for other people,” she explains. “So, journaling had a pragmatic purpose psychologically and socially: it was where I could express things that I didn’t feel comfortable revealing in my daily life. Writing was necessary for me very early on. As soon as I figured out that a writer was a thing you could be, I couldn’t imagine being anything else.”
Determining that high school was not going to help her become a writer, she dropped out at 16, opting to get her GED. An often-restless sensation seeker with what she now thinks was probably undiagnosed ADHD, she moved out of her family home and headed to Boston, where she worked odd jobs and took night classes at Harvard Extension School. She also developed the beginnings of
what would become a serious drug problem.
Two years later, Febos enrolled at the New School for her BA. During her time in New York City, she worked as a dominatrix—partly to support herself and partly for the novelty of the experience—and became increasingly dependent on heroin, subjects she explores in depth in her debut, Whip Smart. “After writing that, I thought, Oh good. Now I never have to write about sex work or addiction ever again,” she says. “But that was, like, hilariously naive.”
As the subject of her own books, retreading material is somewhat inevitable. “I try to strike a balance somewhere between trusting new readers to keep up and trusting returning readers to remember,” she says. The period covered in The Dry Season is a direct result of the dissolution of the fraught relationship at the center of Abandon Me. Following that heartbreak, and several unsatisfying situationships, Febos was in need of a romantic reset. “So that’s where it slots into the timeline of my life. But aesthetically it’s number five for sure.”
In each book she’s written, Febos says, she’s attempted to take on a new set of “structural and aesthetic concerns” that she’s “not entirely comfortable with” to keep herself from becoming bored. Initially, she conceived of The Dry Season as an essay in her collection Girlhood, but the page count quickly ballooned. Still, she was not convinced there was enough meat on its bones to sustain a full-length work.
“That was a transformative year, but it was also one of the happiest years of my life,” she says. “I’d never tried to write about happiness before; I wasn’t sure there would be enough conflict.”
To beef up the story, she imagined weaving her experience giving up romantic love and lust—chronicling frequent temptations, a foray into a sex addict support group, and a whole new way of moving through the world—into a “global history of liberatory female celibacy.” But, laughing, she says, “The idea that I would be able to fit all that together sounds totally deranged to me now.”
While not quite so ambitious, the finished product does contain mountains of Febos’s research into historical figures, from Sappho to the beguines to Virginia Woolf—much of which was conducted during her celibate year. “It’s a thing I always do when trying to make sense of my experience,” she says. “I make a study of it. I’m reading a book, I’m having intellectual conversations about celibacy with people, and all the time I am trudging toward the reality of what it actually means in the context of my life.”
Reconstructing her personal narrative in richly embodied and often surprisingly sensual prose required its own kind of research, including combing through old journals and interviewing her friends about their experience of that year. Adding these outside perspectives allowed her to address any potential skepticism about her project head-on. “So, you’re going to give up sex for three months?” she quotes one friend as saying. “Fuck you, Melissa.”
“How could I write this book and not have a sense of humor about it?” Febos asks. “I know that what’s transformative in one person’s life is not guaranteed to have that same effect in another’s, but I trust that people will see the relative radical nature of this experience in my life.”
At the end of 2016, Febos met the poet Donika Kelly, her future wife—a love story that puts a sweet button on her celibate season, though initially she didn’t want to include it in the book, telling her editor, Knopf’s Vanessa Haughton, that she intended to cut off the narrative just before their meeting. “She was like, ‘You’re joking,’ ” Febos says. “But I didn’t want to distract from my true aim, which had nothing to do with finding a partner. Really, before I met Donika, I believed that I would never be in another romantic relationship because I felt so complete on my own.”
As she concluded a draft of The Dry Season, however, Febos says she realized it would be unfaithful to the integrity of the story to leave it out: “Because that’s literally what happened. I feel like meeting her was a consequence of the change that I underwent that year.”
The true substance of that change, Febos says, was a “spiritual awakening” that saw her embrace a new, more expansive definition of love. “The beguines have a saying that sits really deep in me now,” she says. “ ‘All for all.’ That’s the goal. It’s not me for me, or you for me, or even me for you. It’s all for all.” Later, she adds, “This isn’t a book about romantic love, or sexual love, or any kind of capitalist idea of love, or, like, pop song love. But it is
a book about true love.”
