BookBrowse Reviews The Dry Season by Melissa Febos

BookBrowse:

The Dry Season by award-winning memoirist Melissa Febos is an intellectually rigorous, unapologetically confessional account of giving up sex and romantic relationships in pursuit of a more authentic relationship with herself and her art.

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Two years after the chaotic, self-imposed implosion of her most significant romantic relationship (an affair and breakup she dubs "the Maelstrom") and on the heels of yet another anxiety-provoking bad date, Melissa Febos came to an overdue realization: "I scrolled back in time and saw that … I was drawn to the bright promise of sex and romance, only to find it soon tasteless like that cheap gum I used to love as a kid, chasing the bloom of acid sweetness piece after piece until my jaw ached." Belatedly prompted by an offhand comment by her mother that she previously ignored ("Don't you think you should take a break?"), Febos—who hasn't been single since her teens—sets off what's initially a three-month experiment with celibacy.

Febos's rationale is that by stepping away from what has been a relentless pursuit of sexual attraction and infatuation with various partners, she might be better able to define what it is she actually wants, not only in her intimate relationships but also in her life more broadly. She finds initial inspiration in the lives of the beguines, an order of medieval religious laywomen whose abstinence from sex enabled them to find an unusual (for the time) kind of freedom, one that placed God, and themselves—not subservience to men—at the center of their lives. For Febos, who is primarily attracted to women and who doesn't believe in God, this proto-feminist sensibility isn't a perfect analogy to her own situation. However, she recognizes that her decades-long preoccupation with love and romance does, in its way, participate in patriarchal narratives: "I had not given up sex to get freedom from men, though many of the things I wanted freedom from were inaugurated by them and are perpetuated by the social structures that privilege them," she writes.

For Febos, who has written elsewhere about her recovery from substance abuse, the idea of giving up something is not new; she quickly realizes, however, that her celibacy project is not exactly the same as a recovery from addiction. Unlike with sobriety, Febos doesn't intend to become celibate for life; she fully intends to return to romantic love and sex once she has a healthier framework for doing so. But she does find a roadmap in the language and processes of recovery; among other things, she follows a friend's advice to use this time to trace the history of her romantic and sexual partners in order to identify harmful patterns and establish new ones.

In addition to her personal history, Febos finds solace and inspiration in the stories of women artists and creatives who lived outside traditional expectations of romantic love and sex. All of them—from writers like Octavia Butler and Virginia Woolf to visual artists like painter Agnes Martin (see Beyond the Book) and photographer Nan Goldin—unapologetically centered their own creative ambitions. On one particularly transformative trip to London's Bloomsbury neighborhood, Febos realizes the extent to which she's become accustomed to adapting even her daily routines to accommodate the preferences of romantic partners; freed of such expectations, she can establish a routine of reading, writing, exercise, and exploration that best serves her art, and thereby her own happiness. Febos also answers for herself a question that has always plagued her—without religious faith, what so-called higher power can she surrender to (a key component of many recovery programs)? The answer, for her, is art; thinking back to her spiritual forebears, she reflects, "There was plenty of hideous shit in their lifetimes and they turned, again and again, to that most reliable higher power: art. I had faith in that practice, in the great shell of history that held us all, in the work of listening through divine reading, of speaking back into that vastness through art."

Febos's work stitches together elements of memoir and criticism into a pleasurably elegant yet emotional whole. Her intellectual exploration is rigorous, and her self-examination is equally ruthless—she comes to take responsibility for the elements of her sexual and romantic history that have hurt others and also damaged her. Readers may find some of these confessional elements difficult to read, but Febos is decidedly more devoted to being honest than to being likeable on the page.

Likewise, readers who are or have ever been involuntarily single or celibate may find some of Febos's attitude toward her own desirability callous or even hurtful; although she does touch on the need for sensitivity when discussing her project with lonely or unhappily single friends, Febos is utterly confident in her sexual allure and ability to readily attract a romantic partner whenever she chooses to do so. Only rarely does the book veer into self-help territory; eventually Febos compiles a list of touchstones for herself that can guide future relationships, which is included as an appendix. But The Dry Season overall is a beautifully wrought celebration of finding joy in solitude, in art, and in non-sexual pleasures: wearing comfortable shoes, getting lost in a bookstore, dancing with abandon.

This review first ran in the June 4, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.