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A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex
by Melissa Febos
Book Reviewed by: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.
Excerpt
The Dry Season
One of the last people I had sex with before I stopped having sex was a museum curator. She was going through a divorce and had the manic eyes of someone desperate to escape their current situation.
In the Brooklyn lesbian tradition, we did not call our first date a date but simply dinner, therefore maintaining the possibility that it was not a date, just a meal between potential friends, until we decided whether or not we wanted it to be a date. We met at a wobbly table in a nice-ish restaurant in Williamsburg. She was beautiful in the candlelight, with high cheekbones and a shapely mouth, though our senses of humor seemed incompatible; she barely laughed at my jokes and didn't make many herself.
As I sawed into my cauliflower steak—the biggest scam of all vegetarian entrées, though I kept optimistically ordering it in all the little restaurants of New York City that had discovered they could charge meat prices for a slab of fibrous water sprinkled with ...
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. 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'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...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love
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. Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
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. Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters
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.
In The Dry Season, Melissa Febos seeks out stories of creative women who might serve as models for the kind of artistic life she hopes to pursue following a period of self-enforced celibacy. One of these forebears is the abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin. In Martin, Febos encounters a creative visionary whose own inspiration seemed almost mystically acquired, but who didn't believe in God; she also admires the value Martin placed on self-understanding above all. "The intellect has nothing to do with artwork," Febos quotes Martin as saying, "A lot of people will think that social understanding or something like that is going to lead us to the truth, but it isn't. It is understanding of yourself."
Martin didn't truly ...
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