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A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex
by Melissa Febos
From the national bestselling author of Girlhood, an examination of the solitude, freedoms, and feminist heroes Melissa Febos discovered during a year of celibacy. A wise and transformative look at relationships and self-knowledge.
In the wake of a catastrophic two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break—for three months she would abstain from dating, from relationships, and sex. Her friends were amused. Did she really think three months was a long time? But to Febos, it was. Ever since her teens, she had been in one relationship after another. As she puts it, she could trace a "daisy chain of romances" from her adolescence to her mid-thirties. Finally, she would carve out time to focus on herself and examine the patterns that had produced her midlife disaster. Over those first few months, she gleaned insights into her past and awoke to the joys of being single. She decided to extend her celibacy, not knowing it would become the most fulfilling and sensual year of her life. No longer defined by her romantic pursuits, she learned to relish the delights of solitude, the thrill of living on her own terms, the sensual pleasures unmediated by lovers, and the freedom to pursue her ideals without distraction or guilt. Bringing her own experiences into conversation with those of women throughout history—from Hildegard von Bingen, Virginia Woolf, and Octavia Butler to the Shakers and Sappho—Febos situates her story within a newfound lineage of role models who unapologetically pursued their ambitions and ideals.
By abstaining from all forms of romantic entanglement, Febos began to see her life and her self-worth in a radical new way. Her year of divestment transformed her relationships with friends and peers, her spirituality, her creative practice, and most of all her relationship to herself. Blending intimate personal narrative and incisive cultural criticism, The Dry Season tells a story that's as much about celibacy as its inverse: pleasure, desire, fulfillment. Infused with fearless honesty and keen intellect, it's the memoir of a woman learning to live at the center of her own story, and a much-needed catalyst for a new conversation around sex and love.
"Although a book about abstention, at its essence this story is about understanding, reclaiming, and celebrating pleasure, rendered sublimely and with wit. A gorgeous and thought-provoking memoir about how celibacy can teach us about love." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] bold account... Febos convincingly makes the case for serial daters to slow down and reflect on their past relationships free from the cloud of a current entanglement. As fascinating as it is liberating, this is not to be missed." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Melissa Febos is a writer of singular wisdom and compassion, and The Dry Season is an utterly consuming and deeply generous book—an illuminating exploration of solitude and partnership, intimacy and manipulation, the stories we tell ourselves about the choices we make and how we might unlearn those stories to see ourselves more clearly. Reading this book, I felt an ecstatic, nerve-tingling gratitude, like it was written just for me—finding such crisp, incisive language for emotional knots I've felt caught inside for years—but part of the joy of this feeling was knowing how many people will feel the same way: that this book was written just for them." —Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters
"The Dry Season is brilliant and powerful meditation upon addiction, desire, seduction, and the undervalued (and all-too-unexplored) power of a woman laying claim to a period of celibacy for spiritual and personal reasons. Febos is both unflinching and compassionate as she inventories all that she has done for love, and what she will never do again. A deeply important book, and I saw myself and many women whom I love and admire on every page." —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love
"Melissa Febos's The Dry Season will be called a book about abstinence, about celibacy, but it's so much more than that. This is a book about obsession, compulsion, about self and self-lessness, about sex and love and art and faith and the capacity of each to swallow us whole, to obliterate us, make us anew alit with our history instead of engulfed by it. Febos talks back to time as she unravels it, inviting everyone into the conversation from Hadewijch to Hildegard, Foucault to Lorde, St. Augustine to Annie Dillard. The Dry Season is about reenchanting oneself with the world. It's the best book yet by one of contemporary non-fiction's lodestars." —Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
This information about The Dry Season was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Melissa Febos is the national bestselling author of four books, including Girlhood—which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. She has been awarded prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, LAMBDA Literary, the National Endowment for the Arts, the British Library, the Black Mountain Institute, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Best American Essays, Vogue, The Sewanee Review, New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Febos is a full professor at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly.
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