Excerpt from The Dry Season by Melissa Febos, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I know," I said. "Of course I know that. Hang on, I'm about to run the blender."

"What's in your smoothie?" she asked, but I didn't attempt to answer over the machine's roar.

The problem with making a radical personal decision is that it pales in comparison to most things one might consider radical, like political revolution, religious conversion, suicide, or even divorce. A personal revolution is entirely subjective. Veganism, parenthood, sobriety, and, yes, three months of celibacy are attempts to induce a dramatic change in one's life, a fact they share with political revolution, but on a different scale. A shift can be radical and ordinary at the same time. Or meaningless, when removed from the context of a life.

I didn't say any of this to my mother because it would have been patronizing and unnecessary. She has made many radical personal decisions, including living in a commune, escaping a cult, raising her baby (me) vegetarian in the 1980s, two divorces, one religious conversion, and several dramatic career changes. She wasn't refuting my decision, only pointing out the obvious with her usual unvarnished honesty. It had been she who most persistently recommended that I take a break in between relationships over the years, and she who knew better than most the reasons why I ought to.

More relevant to our conversation was the feeling of pressure inside me that had been accumulating for years, and accelerating over the past six months. We imagine the need for change manifesting in blatant ways because that's how it is represented in movies and memoirs and TV commercials: a eureka moment that requires little discernment. I must leave my spouse! I'm a lesbian! I can no longer toil as a cog in this machine! For me, and I think most people, it is less specific and more atmospheric, a recognition of the air quality rather than a strike of lightning. Perhaps there are some who recognize the first signs and change with haste, but I am not one. I cling to the habitual. I avoid inconvenient truth. I interrogate intuition. I let the pressure build until the discomfort of staying the same grows greater than my discomfort with changing.

When I was younger that pressure took the shape of what I called "free-floating anxiety," as if anxiety were a weather system or airborne disease that I had randomly encountered, rather than an internal response to my external life conditions, a result of my own choices. Anxiety, one therapist told me, is a secondary emotion, a response to emotion. Buddhists calls this the second arrow. I don't know what Catholics call it, probably guilt.

Whatever I called it, it had returned, a cloud bank of fear that pressed dully over the whole sky. It was worst in the mornings. Since getting sober, I'd woken up happy most mornings, but now it took an hour to muster enough gumption to face the day. I felt feral and sad and couldn't explain it, but I knew that something had to change.

"It's got strawberries, frozen banana, spinach, protein powder, and soy milk," I told my mother, taking a sip through my smoothie straw. "A lot of spinach."

"Yum," she said. "You can put so much spinach in a smoothie without it tasting like spinach; it's amazing."

"I know," I said. "The color is so bright but it just tastes like nothing."

Excerpted from The Dry Season by Melissa Febos. Copyright © 2025 by Melissa Febos. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.