Melissa Febos tried to tell this story before. The author of four (soon to be five) published memoirs, Febos had written an essay for her third book, 2021’s Girlhood, which almost immediately ballooned beyond its page limit. “I got to 20 pages, and I had barely started,” she tells ELLE.com. “I was like, ‘Okay, this is something else.’” Three years later, she’s at last revisited the experience that first inspired that essay: her year without sex.
Around 2016, Febos took a temporary vow of celibacy, determined to determine why her romantic relationships seemed to crumble in her wake—and if her obsession with romance itself had anything to do with it. She started with three months: During those three months, she’d forego—for the first time in 20 years—any form of romantic situation. But when she realized, after those three months, that she was actually having a wonderful time, she renewed her vow for another three months, and another, until she’d spent an entire year single. Not just single, but abstinent.
But it took Febos another handful of years to be able to process the importance of that year, and to craft the resulting memoir, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex, set to release from Knopf on June 3, 2025. “It took all of these years for me to really see the way [that year] redrew the blueprint of how I was going to move through relationships for the rest of my life,” Febos says. “I don’t think I could have written it any sooner than I did.”
She’s all too aware that, for some readers, the concept behind her book might come across laughable in its modernity. People have been abstaining from sex for centuries—some purposefully, others not for lack of wanting. But, Febos argues, that’s precisely the point of her story. By examining the lives of famous women in history, many of them also voluntarily celibate and/or single, The Dry Season re-considers “an old set of themes,” Febos says. “How do we not lose ourselves in love? How do we hold on to our beliefs and our ethics in the face of great feeling? I’m trying to look at that in a moderate way, trying to find new ways of looking at a very old problem.”
That “old set of themes” is similarly reflected in The Dry Season’s cover, which depicts a neon-diffused Sappho by the artist Auguste Charles Mengin. Febos personally requested that the 1877 painting make an appearance on her book cover, given that the artwork “has always been a touchstone for me,” she says. She describes the painting—and, by extension, the cover—as “serious and beautiful and magnetic and interesting,” but notes that “it also has a sense of humor.” The subject “just looks so hot and sulky, which is exactly what my type is: a hot, sulky, intellectual lesbian.”
For Febos, Sappho became a symbol in The Dry Season “of the ways that we can experience sublimity and ecstasy and the full range of our emotions, without using other people to extract those feelings or imposing narratives on them. We can find it in friendship and in art and in activism. This painting became a token of that realization for me.”
Ahead, the memoirist discusses the real-life saga behind her latest book; how she approached celibacy with nuance and humor; and what it’s like letting audiences into her most intimate experiences.
The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex by Melissa Febos
When did you first realize that this year, this experience of celibacy, could make for a good memoir?
First, I had the experience. Something I get asked a lot as a memoirist who writes about somewhat extreme experiences is if I chose to do things in order to write about them. For better or worse, the answer is no almost all of the time. I just live myself into corners and then have to find a way out. Writing is part of how I do that.
I had the experience of this year, and during that year I started doing research, really for my own edification. I’ve always gone to books and other thinkers throughout history to try to make sense of my life. So I made an independent study of my personal experience because I’m a nerd and I needed a job to do. And it might sound cliché, but I was totally transformed. It really, really changed not only how I relate to sex and romance and see those elements in the context of my life, but also who I see as role models.
I really spent that year trying to let go of this lineage that I think I had belonged to, involuntarily, of these overemotional, romantic people who were thrown around by love and romance and very obsessive and out of control. I spent this time looking for people who had big, self-actualized, beautiful, art-oriented lives that didn’t necessarily exclude love, but weren’t ruled by it—or at least by this romantic fantasy of it.
How did you approach the nuances of your own experience with celibacy, knowing your readers will have reactions on opposite ends of the spectrum—somewhere between “Why would anyone ever do this?” and “I’ve been doing this for years”?
It’s a delicate balance when you’re writing memoir. One human story is never going to speak for everyone, certainly not in a literal way. Having published four [memoirs] before, I know what all the responses are going to be. There’s a balance to letting those questions in, in a generous and fruitful way, instead of just imagining the bad-faith reader on Twitter who’s going to be like, “LOL.”
I didn’t want the book to be self-centered in a bad way. I wanted it to be self-centered in a way that offered my experience as a lens to look through in an analogous way. There are going to be people who were like me, who are in non-stop relationships and felt out of control in that, or people who were non-stop not in relationships and felt out of control. I don’t actually see those patterns as disparate from one another; I think they have more in common than they have in contrast. So I think of the book not as about a woman who’s in too many relationships, but a woman who is not living within her own beliefs and is not living within her true instincts.
Even though I had been in therapy forever, this was an area of my life where I hadn’t changed very much over time. I hadn’t really tried to change because there’s this huge, bloated, romantic, commercialized story about love where I was like, “This is what it’s supposed to be like! I’m supposed to be crashing on the shores of love and then just scraping myself up and starting over.” Then, when I got to my mid-30s, I was like, “Am I? Am I actually just pretty undeveloped in this way? Is our culture pretty undeveloped in this way?”
I don’t think it’s as much about sex or romance or abstinence as it is about, How do I look at a part of my life and the way it sits within our cultural beliefs and prescriptions, and how do I decide to change? It’s a road map to recouping my agency and how I relate to an element of my life so that it feels truer.
How would you say that this book exists in conversation with your previous books?
I see all of my books as a kind of progression. The year I write about in The Dry Season took place after my second book; it picks up where Abandon Me left off. I have this very catastrophic breakup that I described in that book. Then I have this inflection point, this moment of reckoning. But I would say that, just as essays aren’t always organized chronologically, insight isn’t either. So these are the most immediate insights that I have.
I think this is the culmination of the work that I did in all my previous books—my whole life—up until now. If I hadn’t looked at my adolescence in Girlhood, and the ways that had played out in my adulthood, there’s no way I would’ve been available for this work, for really looking at my relationships with adults and stepping into my adulthood in the way that I describe in The Dry Season. I can’t skip over big pieces in order to get where I am now. That’s why I really can say in good faith that, even though I’ve made many horrible decisions and suffered some and embarrassed myself a lot, I wouldn’t change anything because I think every part is essential to the whole.
What was most challenging about writing The Dry Season, and was it challenging in a different way than the memoirs that preceded it?
People who don’t really read memoir or take it seriously think of it as a self-indulgent form. But it’s actually the opposite of that. You really have to annihilate your fantasy of yourself in order to write a memoir, or in order to write one that’s worth other people reading. You have to confront the parts of yourself that you’re able to hide from in your daily life. I did some exhaustive work during [the year chronicled in The Dry Season] to figure out who I have been in relationships, and to face my own complicity in the disasters of my romantic life. But there’s nothing like writing a book about it to really kick over that log and see all the bugs underneath.
This was an area of my life where I had not seen myself accurately, and I couldn’t do so until I wrote this book, because writing a book is so private; it’s even more private than therapy. I’m able to be honest in ways that I can’t with another person in the room, and because I can sit with it as long as I want and think about the way that I most want to communicate. It wasn’t always cute, but it’s definitely an exercise in character-building.
I’m curious about the leap, then: from the privacy of writing to the exposure of publishing. What is it like doing all that processing on the page, and then deciding to let the whole world in?
You’re catching me right at the moment where I’m transitioning from one to the other because I have the gift of compartmentalization.
First, I have to think about the other people who are in the book. How do I proceed ethically in terms of handling them and their identities? Then I have to think about everyone who might read it. The good news is that, if I had to think about that at the beginning of the process, I would never write anything because it would be horrifying. I can’t imagine talking to a microphone about my secrets, but spend five years alone thinking about it? My relationship to [the secret] has been totally transformed.
For me, the process of writing memoir is one of integration. One of the ways I know I’m done writing a book is that I don’t have any shame left. I’ve taken accountability with myself and named things in the truest way that I’m capable of. I’m excited to share it with people, at that point, because it really has landed inside of me, like, “Oh, wow, I saw that there was an issue with how I was living, and I was unhappy about it. I went about to try to change my life and myself and to love people better and to relate to myself more intimately, and I fucking did it and that’s amazing.”
Writing a book is one job. Publishing a book is a different job. I like both of those jobs, but I’m going to get my feelings hurt. I’m going to connect with people in ways that absolutely open my heart. It’s all going to happen again.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
