The Dry Season A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

Melissa Febos

eBook - 2025

From Melissa Febos, the national bestselling author of Girlhood, comes an examination of the solitude, freedoms, and feminist heroes she discovered during a year of celibacy and a wise and transformative look at relationships and self-knowledge. “Only Melissa Febos could convince us of the ecstasy of abstinence. She never fails in her candor and precision.”—Katherine May, author of WinteringIn the wake of a catastrophic two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break: For three months she would abstain from dating, 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 with men and women.... As she puts it, she could trace a “daisy chain of romances” from her adolescence to her midthirties. Finally, she would carve out time to focus on herself and examine the patterns that... more