CANR
WORK TITLE: The Dry Season
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://melissafebos.com/
CITY: Iowa City
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: LRC Jan 2022
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born September 28, 1980; daughter of a sea captain and a Buddhist psychotherapist; married Donika Kelly (a poet).
EDUCATION:Attended Purchase College and Harvard University; Eugene Lang College of The New School University, B.A.; Sarah Lawrence College, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Has worked as a chambermaid, boatyard hand, babysitter, dishwasher, and waitress; spent four years working as a professional dominatrix in Manhattan, NY; Baccalaureate School for Global Education, Astoria, NY, instructor, 2006-07; Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, New York, NY, instructor, 2007-08; SUNY Purchase College, Purchase, NY, lecturer, beginning 2007; Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, lecturer, 2008-09; Gotham Writers’ Workshop, New York, NY, faculty, beginning 2008; New York University, New York, NY, lecturer, beginning 2009; Utica College, Utica, NY, instructor; Monmouth University, West Long Branch, NJ, assistant professor of creative writing and MFA faculty, until 2020; University of Iowa, Iowa City, professor of English. Founder of Prospect Writes, New York, 2009—. Cofounder, cocurator, and host of monthly music and reading series Mixer Reading and Music Series, New York, NY, ten years; member of board of directors of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, five years; former member of PEN America Membership Committee.
AWARDS:MacDowell Colony four-time fellow; first place winner of the Memoirs, Ink half-yearly contest, 2010; recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, BAU Institute at the Camargo Foundation, and Ragdale Foundation; Sarah Verdone Writing Award, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, 2018; Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, Lambda Literary, 2018, for Abandon Me; National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, 2021, for Girlhood; Guggenheim Fellowship, 2022; National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, 2022.
WRITINGS
Contributor to Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, Seal Press, 2013. Contributor of essays, stories, journalism, and poems to periodicals and websites, including the Believer, Bitch, Bomb, Bookforum, Cape Cod Life, Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, Front Porch Journal, Granta, Hunger Mountain, Kenyon Review, New York Times, Paris Review, Post Road, Prairie Schooner, Rambler, Redivider, Sadie, Sewanee Review, Southeast Review, Sun, Tin House, Vogue, and Yale Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Melissa Febos is a New Englander who managed to progress from a desultory early adulthood to a successful career teaching at the college level and writing nonfiction. She dropped out of high school at age fifteen and home-schooled herself for the next year. Concerning her independent reading habits, she told Juliana Ukiomogbe of Interview, “I read everything I could get my hands on as a kid: poetry, thrillers, romances, YA fiction, poetry, erotica. … I devoured stories about anyone queer, addicts and alcoholics, sex workers, memoirs of madness—I was obsessed with all kinds of outsider narratives.”
At the age of sixteen, Febos moved from her family home on Cape Cod to Boston, where she worked as a waitress and attended night school at Harvard University. With regard to a prospective career, Febos told Ukiomogbe, “My first idea about writers was that they could be misfits—totally debauched or unhinged or simply strange—and still have a role in society, which was a huge relief for me. I could not imagine … any other occupation that would be capacious enough to hold all that I was: queer, passionate, compulsive, ultra-sensitive, fanciful, sexual, secretive, and seemingly unable to maintain focus on anything that didn’t interest me.” In 1999 she moved to New York to finish her bachelor’s degree at the New School University, and she went on to receive an M.F.A. in writing from Sarah Lawrence College. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, she was engaged as an instructor at an overlapping series of institutions, culminating in a long-held position at Monmouth University, in New Jersey. In 2020 she took a position as associate professor of English at the University of Iowa.[close revisions]
Although the author made the decision to become a writer when she was seven years old, she noted in an interview on her home page that she never thought she would be writing about being involved in a notorious profession. In her memoir, Whip Smart, Febos writes about her four years working as a professional dominatrix and overcoming a drug habit, all while attending college and graduating with honors. Although she considered publishing her memoir under a pseudonym, Febos commented in her home page interview that she felt it was important to pen her memoir under her real name because part of the book’s theme is the importance of avoiding living a secret life.
“Overall, Whip Smart is an intriguing and informative book that explores the many types of addictions, while giving you a unique perspective into the word of the sex industry,” wrote Kimberlie Wiese on the MC Reviews website. Noting that “Febos’s electrifying prose and unremitting honesty continually challenge the reader,” a Kirkus Reviews contributor added: The author “expertly captures grace within depravity.”
According to Febos, she became a dominatrix after answering an advertisement in the Village Voice looking for a young woman to work as a dominatrix and role play as a nurse. The job required no experience or having sex with the customers, and it paid seventy-five dollars an hour. In an interview with Alyssa Fetini on Time Online, Febos explained why she took the job. Noting that her primary way of making money since she was a teenager had been working in coffee shops, the author said: “I [actually] went looking for the ad. I already had it in my mind that I wanted to be a dominatrix. It represented the potential for a double life and I’d always been drawn to that. In the beginning, I thought of myself as a cultural anthropologist—a student of human behavior. I was also sick of making lattes.”
Febos worked as a dominatrix in midtown Manhattan in a commercial “dungeon.” Writing in the introduction to Whip Smart, the author notes: “What began as a job became a life, and my most captivating secret of all. Behind that unmarked Midtown door, I uncovered hiding places that I hadn’t known existed in me, and whose contents weren’t easy to behold. Ultimately, though, when I did, it surprised me to find that my own dark underside wasn’t so strange or sick as I feared.”
According to Febos, most of her clients were professional men in position of power. The author told Marie Claire contributor Abigail Pesta that these were “men who told people what to do all day and wanted someone to boss them around.” The author points out, however, that her clientele came from a wide range of professions. “My client base consisted of stockbrokers, lawyers, doctors, rabbis, grandpas, bus drivers, restaurateurs and retirees,” the author noted in an interview with Alicia Rancilio on Washington Examiner Online.
While much of the book focuses on her work as a dominatrix and the variety of her clients’ requests, from tooth pulling to squishing bugs with her feet, the author also writes about her youth and her addiction to heroin, an addiction that she supported with her wages as a dominatrix. In an interview with Frisky website contributor Jessica Wakeman, the author commented that writing about these two taboo subjects—being a dominatrix and a drug addict—was “equally challenging,” adding: “But as far as the sex work part, for me, that required a lot of self-examination.” The author also noted in the interview: “I’ve learned some unexpected things about myself.” As for the drug addiction, Febos told Wakeman: “In order for me to get clean, I had to already investigate those motives and those parts of myself and my psyche. So, it wasn’t that difficult to write about why I was an addict or what that experience was like, but it was more intense to relive those experiences, actually. Writing about using and shooting up was pretty intense.”
Tebo writes in her memoir that her work as a dominatrix initially gave her a strong sense of power of confidence. “At first, I thought, I’m playing this very powerful role. I’m bossing men around; I have all the power,” Febos told Marie Claire contributor Abigail Pesta. “After I did it for a while, I realized that I was really conforming to … [their] fantasies.” The author went on to tell Pesta: “And so it started to dawn on me that I wasn’t really in control.”
Whip Smart describes how Febos eventually started attending Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in an effort to overcome her drug habit. She writes that overcoming her addiction to being a dominatrix turned out to be much more difficult. Febos explains that she only got out of the business after facing her own demons, including her depression and some basic truths about who she really was.
“The thing that strikes us the most about Febos’ memoir, is how it all ends,” wrote a contributor to the Seattlest website, adding: “Rarely do these stories have happy endings, or do you hear about women pulling themselves up by their bra straps, getting clean, and quitting the ‘industry.’” Calling Whip Smart a “candid, hard-slogging debut,” a Publishers Weekly contributor also wrote that the author “mines the darkest, most troubling aspects of human interaction.”
In an interview on the Lemondrop website, the author commented on the questions she is asked most about her time as a dominatrix. People often asked about her family’s knowledge of and reaction to her profession. Febos noted in the interview that she first told her brother but had a much more difficult time deciding to tell her parents. Febos commented: “Then I told my mom, which was harder. She accepted my argument for it, how empowering it was, but I knew she wasn’t comfortable. I told my dad last. What father wants to know that about his daughter?”
In her next book, another memoir titled Abandon Me, Febos presents a series of introspective essays focusing on her family and her relationship with a married lesbian. She also addresses her reconnecting with her birth father, a Wampanoag Native American and an alcoholic and drug addict. More influential in her life, however, was her adoptive father. A sea captain, he was often absent for extended periods of time, which, according to Febos, was damaging to the family and led Febos to have fears of abandonment. Looking back at her relationship with her adoptive father, who was very loving when he was around, Febos finds some answers as to why she became involved in a doomed relationship with a controlling lesbian lover. Febos also touches upon other family matters, including her half-brother, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
“This collection terrified me,” Febos noted in an interview with Rumpus website contributor Leigh Stein, adding: “I had no idea where each essay was going when I started it, and before that I’d been a very pragmatic writer—an outliner. Having clear limits … helped me move into and through this material, which was like groping through a dark room, but a room whose dimensions I could choose.”
Febos begins Abandon Me with an essay titled “The Book of Hours,” in which she writes about the stories of peoples’ lives had how they can be compared to lovers, hoping the stories can help us deal with our lives. For her essay titled “Labyrinths,” Febos draws from Greek mythology and the movie Labyrinth to address her own drug addiction as well as her brother’s mental problems. The second half of Abandon Me is made up entirely of the title essay. “Were this fiction, we’d call it a novella,” noted Lambda Literary website contributor Sara Rauch, who added that the essay “delves more deeply into the stories Febos has expertly set into place in the earlier essays.” In an interview with Publishers Weekly contributor Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, Febos noted: “The title essay was definitely the hardest. I had intended that it be about forty pages long, and it was about 150 pages.”
The title essay revolves around Febos’s relationship with her lesbian lover, Amaia, and Febos finally meeting her biological father. The married Amaia lives on the other side of the country but showers Febos with expensive gifts, a reminder to Febos of how her adopted father would always bring gifts back to her when he returned from sea. Amaia in many ways made Febos feel wanted but at the same time could also be emotionally distant yet controlling. As a result, Febos’s old fears of abandonment are aroused. It is through her meeting with her biological father that Febos largely comes to terms with understanding her relationship with Amaia.
“Erotic and dark, the book is a courageous exploration of love as the ultimate form of plenitude and annihilation,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor, who went on to call Abandon Me “a lyrically visceral memoir of love and loss.” Sibbie O’Sullivan, writing in the Washington Post, remarked: “Abandon Me is a step up from the lurid Whip Smart, because Febos links her self-investigation to larger adult concerns of family obligations and healthy loving.”
Febos’s next work, a fresh collection of essays, is Girlhood. She shared with Sarah Neilson of Bomb that she thinks of the title ironically, since for her the term is weighted with “all of the prescriptions and connotations that are assigned to it by the gender binary-enforcing mainstream culture.” She added, “I still feel a little bit ambivalent about it. Because girlhood was such a gnarly experience for me, and my experience … just didn’t fit with anything that that term suggests.” The essays examine a number of different aspects of being young and female in American society, with ample reference to relevant scholars to support her points. In the essay “Wild America,” Febos draws from her childhood-favorite PBS show as she reflects on enjoying her young animal self—and realizing how society would tame her. “Kettle Holes” centers on a neighborhood boy who made a misogynistic habit of spitting on her. “Thank You for Taking Care of Yourself” concerns an adult “cuddle party” and the convolutions of questions of consent and the under-discussed gray area between consent and abuse. The way men’s romantic interest can turn violent, and yet be condoned by society as courtship, is addressed in “Intrusions,” while “Thesmophoria” focuses on the author’s relationship with her mother and the risky adolescent behaviors she kept secret.
Febos gave a nuanced description of her modus operandi in this collection in speaking with Kelly Thompson on the Rumpus website, relating: “The book is very much a transcript of my process of recognizing conditions or patterns or problems, and then burrowing into them and excavating, interrupting, intercepting, problematizing them and in many cases resolving, or at least moving in the direction of resolving them. I wanted the book to contain my whole process and to, in many ways, function as a kind of model for how it can be done, a testimony that it is possible.”
In Bomb, Neilson suggested that the essays in Girlhood “read like sculpture: sentences chiseled and combined into profound, moving works. Whether she’s writing about a childhood soccer game or a cuddle party or a hike in France or sex or Greek myth or addiction, her essays dance between philosophical, humorous, and sensual.” Booklist writer Annie Bostrom called Girlhood a “book of liberating inquiry and divine depth.” A Kirkus Reviews writer praised Febos’s effort effusively, declaring, “Profound and gloriously provocative, this book … transforms the wounds and scars of lived female experience into an occasion for self-understanding that is both honest and lyrical.” The writer lauded Febos’s “consistently illuminating, unabashedly ferocious writing.”
After writing three volumes with a consistently autobiographical focus, Febos turned to the craft of writing itself—and its essential role in her life—with Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. At the heart of the text is her affirmation that reflecting on one’s life through narrative can be not just retrospectively helpful, a way of reckoning with the past, but a way of shaping one’s present self and moving forward. Memoirists are not obsessively “navel-gazing” or simply churning out long-form diaries, but are crafting works that can have transformative effects on both themselves and sympathetic readers. Among Febos’s topics are the delicacies (or lack thereof) in writing about sex, the question of her mother reading her occasionally X-rated work, the distinction between her writing self and her narrating “I,” and her painstaking attention to syntactical details.
A Kirkus Reviews writer affirmed that Febos takes “no prisoners in this strongly worded manifesto—despite her claim on the first page that it is not a manifesto. In fact, her impassioned theses and proclamations about writing are exactly that.” In Publishers Weekly, a reviewer of Body Work commented that Febos’s fellow writers “will appreciate her shrewd takes on the intersection of craft and life” while all readers “will enjoy the artistry on display throughout.”
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Febos continued to explore her own life and the role of memoir in The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in My Year without Sex. The book was inspired by the end of a disastrous romantic relationship and Febos’s realization that she should take a break from love and sex. Initially, she set a goal for herself of three months, but she ended up abstaining for a year. Her year of being single led to a radical new understanding of both herself and how to have a fulfilling and sensual life without romance. Febos also writes about other celibate women throughout history and how their experiences connected to hers.
“This is not to be missed,” wrote a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. They described the book as both “fascinating” and “liberating.” Annie Bostrom, writing in Booklist, agreed. She called Febos a “consummate builder of words and conveyer of ideas,” but Bostrom found this book to be “in a class of its own.” The result is “searching” and “cerebral.”
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BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Febos, Melissa, Whip Smart, St. Martin’s Press (New York, NY), 2010.
Febos, Melissa, Abandon Me, Bloomsbury (New York, NY), 2017.
Febos, Melissa, Girlhood, Bloomsbury (New York, NY), 2021.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 1, 2021, Annie Bostrom, review of Girlhood, p. 13; June, 2025, Annie Bostrom, review of The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year without Sex, p. 16.
BookPage, June, 2025, Cat Acree, “Eyes Wide Open,” pp. 10+.
Brooklyn Rail, June, 2025, Hannah Burns, author interview, p. 40.
Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2010, review of Whip Smart; January 1, 2021, review of Girlhood; January 1, 2022, review of Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative.
Marie Claire, February, 2010, Abigail Pesta, “Punishing Work: Melissa Febos Spent Three Years Whipping Rich Men for Money,” author interview, p. 78.
Publishers Weekly, January 18, 2010, review of Whip Smart, p. 40; September 19, 2016, review of Abandon Me, p. 57; November 30, 2020, review of Girlhood, p. 45; December 6, 2021, review of Body Work, p. 127; April 14, 2025, Phoebe Cramer, “With Pleasure,” author interview; April 21, 2025, review of The Dry Season, p. 40.
Washington Post, March 2, 2017, Sibbi O’Sullivan, “Book World: A Dominatrix Finds Real Life Doesn’t Have Safe Words.”
ONLINE
Baltimore Sun Read Street blog, http:// weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/books/blog/ (March 8, 2010), “Melissa Febos’ Whip Smart.”
Bomb, https://bombmagazine.org/ (March 22, 2021), Sarah Neilson, “Melissa Febos,” author interview.
Chicago Review of Books, https:// chireviewofbooks.com/ (March 2, 2017), Erynn Porter, “Abandoning Expectations with Melissa Febos’s Abandon Me”; (March 31, 2021), Jeannine Burgdorf, “Unifying the Female Self in Girlhood.”
Frisky, http://www.thefrisky.com/ (April 21, 2010), Jessica Wakeman, “Frisky Q & A: Melissa Febos, Ex-Dominatrix and Author of Whip Smart: A Memoir.”
Gotham Writers’ Workshop website, http://www.writingclasses.com/ (October 2, 2010), “Profile: Melissa Febos.”
Interview, https://www.interviewmagazine.com/ (March 30, 2021), Juliana Ukiomogbe, “Melissa Febos on Her Literary Inspirations, Writing Habits, and Notebook Fetish”; June 2, 2025, Emily Ratajkowski, author interview.
IOWA Now, https://now.uiowa.edu/ (May 8, 2025), Steve Schmadeke, “UI Professor, Author Melissa Febos Talks about the Books She Keeps and Why.”
Lambda Literary, http://www.lambdaliterary.org/ (February 5, 2017), Sara Rauch, review of Abandon Me.
Lemondrop, http://www.lemondrop.com/ (April 6, 2010), “10 Things You Don’t Know about My Life as a Dominatrix,” author interview.
Los Angeles Review of Books, https:// lareviewofbooks.org/ (March 30, 2021), Yvonne Conza, “Naming the Silences: A Conversation with Melissa Febos.”
Los Angeles Times, https://www.latimes.com/ (June 3, 2025), Jessica Ferri, “She Gave Up Sex for a Year and Gained Control of Her Life.”
Mantle, https://www.themantle.com/ (January 22, 2022), Aisha Qadry, review of Girlhood.
MC Reviews, http://reviews.media-culture.org.au/ (July 2, 2010), Kimberlie Wiese, “Addicted to Control—Whip Smart by Melissa Febos.”
Melissa Febos website, https://www.melissafebos.com (October 8, 2025).
New York, http://nymag.com/ (February 26, 2010), “Former Dominatrix Melissa Febos Can’t Drive without Compulsively Imagining Her Own Bloody Dismemberment,” author interview; September 20, 2025, Emily Gould, author interview.
Paste, https://www.pastemagazine.com/ (March 1, 2017), Bridey Heing, “Melissa Febos’ Intimate Memoir Abandon Me Will Tap into Your Fears.”
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (April 2, 2010), Rebecca Keith, “The Rumpus Interview with Melissa Febos”; November 27, 2017), Leigh Stein, “The Rumpus Interview with Melissa Febos”; (February 16, 2017), Kea Krause, review of Abandon Me; (March 22, 2021), Kelly Thompson, “Everything Must Change: A Conversation with Melissa Febos.”
San Francisco Bay Guardian, http://www.sfbg.com/ (March 15, 2010), “Melissa Febos Whips It Good,” author interview.
Seattlest, http://seattlest.com/ (March 26, 2010), “Whip Smart‘s Melissa Febos at Elliott Bay Books.”
South China Morning Post, http://www.scmp.com/ (March 3, 2017), “Book Review—Abandon Me: Memoirs Is an Uneven Ride through a New York Dominatrix’s Complicated Life and Loves.”
Time, http://www.time.com/ (March 19, 2010), Alyssa Fetini, “Inside the Secret World of a Dominatrix,” interview with author.
Time Out New York, http://newyork.timeout.com/ (October 2, 2010), review of Whip Smart.
University of Iowa website, https://english.uiowa.edu/ (January 22, 2022), author profile.
Village Voice, http://blogs.villagevoice.com/ (March 26, 2010), Keith Wagstaff, “Melissa Febos—Former Dominatrix—Talks Food Fetishes, Sexy Vegetarianism, and the Allure of a Tube of Cookie Dough.”
Washington Examiner, http:// www.washingtonexaminer.com/ (March 12, 2010), Alicia Rancilio, review of Whip Smart.*
Melissa Febos is the author of five books, including the national bestselling essay collection, GIRLHOOD, which has been translated into ten languages and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Her craft book, BODY WORK (2022), was also a national bestseller and an LA Times Bestseller. A new memoir, The Dry Season, was published by Alfred. A. Knopf in June 2025.
The recipient of fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts, the British Library, MacDowell, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Black Mountain Institute, LAMBDA Literary, the American Library in Paris, and others, Melissa's work has appeared in publications including The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Best American Essays, The Best American Food and Travel Writing, Granta, The Believer, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Elle, and Vogue.
She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is the Roy J. Carver Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program. She lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Melissa Febos is an American writer and professor.[1] She is the author of the memoirs Whip Smart (2010)[2][3] and The Dry Season (2025)[4] and the essay collections Abandon Me (2017), Girlhood (2021), and Body Work (2022).
Early life and education
Febos grew up in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Her father was a sea captain, and her mother a therapist. She left home at 16 after passing the GED, moved to Boston, and worked at an assortment of jobs including as a boatyard hand and as a chambermaid. She attended night courses at Harvard Extension School, then enrolled in The New School and moved to New York City in August 1999. She later earned an MFA at Sarah Lawrence College.[3]
Career
Febos is the author of Whip Smart (St Martin's Press 2010), a memoir of her work as a professional dominatrix while she was studying at The New School.[2][5][6][7] Her second book, the lyric essay collection Abandon Me, was published by Bloomsbury Publishing on February 28, 2017.[8] Abandon Me was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist and a Publishing Triangle Award finalist,[9] and one of the best reviewed books of 2017.[10] Her third book and second essay collection, Girlhood, was published by Bloomsbury Publishing on March 30, 2021.[11][12] It was a national bestseller.[13] Describing Girlhood, The New York Times wrote, "The aim of this book, though, is not simply to tell about her own life, but to listen to the pulses of many others’...This solidarity puts “Girlhood” in a feminist canon that includes Febos’s idol, Adrienne Rich, and Maggie Nelson’s theory-minded masterpieces: smart, radical company, and not ordinary at all."[14] A craft book, Body Work, was published by Catapult in 2022.[15]
Febos was the co-curator, with Rebecca Keith, of the monthly Mixer Reading and Music series on the Lower East Side for ten years.[16] A four-time MacDowell Colony fellow, she has received fellowships from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Her essays have won awards from Prairie Schooner and StoryQuarterly, and for five years she was on the Board of Directors of Vida: Women in Literary Arts. Febos has contributed to publications such as The New York Times, The Paris Review, Salon, Bomb, Hunger Mountain, Prairie Schooner, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Granta, Post Road, Dissent, Vogue, The Believer, The Sewanee Review, Bitch Magazine and The Chronicle of Higher Education.[3]
Febos has taught at SUNY Purchase College, the Gotham Writers' Workshop, The New School, Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and Utica College. Until 2020, she was an Associate Professor and MFA Director at Monmouth University.[17] Febos currently works as a Full Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program.[18]
Media
Whip Smart resulted in a front-page appearance on the cover of the New York Post, a feature interview on NPR's radio program Fresh Air with Terry Gross, a guest appearance on Anderson Cooper's talk show, and an appearance on CNN's Dr. Drew show.
Abandon Me was one of the best reviewed essay collections of 2017 and a Lambda Literary Award finalist.[10] The New Yorker called it "mesmerizing" and wrote that "the sheer fearlessness of the narrative is captivating."[19]
Girlhood was featured on Morning Joe on MSNBC,[20] and on multiple NPR programs. Girlhood won the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.[21]
Her fourth book, Body Work, was a national bestseller and Los Angeles Times Bestseller.[22]
Personal life
Febos is queer. She lives in Iowa with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly.[23]
She spoke at House of SpeakEasy's Seriously Entertaining program about her childhood and rethinking often-normalized experiences of bullying.[24]
Awards
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2010 MacDowell Colony Fellowship[25]
2011 MacDowell Colony Fellowship
2012 Bread Loaf Writers Conference Fellowship
2013 The Prairie Schooner Creative Nonfiction Prize
2013 The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund fellowship
2014 Virginia Center for Creative Arts Residency
2014 A Story Quarterly Essay Prize
2014 MacDowell Colony Fellowship
2015 The Center for Women Writers Creative Nonfiction Prize
2015 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Process Space residency
2015 Vermont Studio Center fellowship
2017 Ragdale Residency
2018 The Sarah Verdone Writing Award, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council[26]
2018 Lambda Literary Award finalist in Memoir/Biography[27]
2018 The Publishing Triangle finalist for the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction[28]
2018 Lambda Literary's Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction[29]
2018 BAU Institute fellowship at The Camargo Foundation
2018 Vermont Studio Center fellowship
2020 MacDowell Colony Fellowship
2021 National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism[30]
2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship[31]
2022 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction[32]
Bibliography
Whip Smart. New York, New York: St. Martin's Press. 2010. ISBN 9780312583781.
Abandon Me. New York, New York: Bloomsbury USA. 2017. ISBN 9781632866585.
Girlhood. New York, New York: Bloomsbury USA. 2021. ISBN 9781635572520.
Body Work. New York, New York: Catapult Publishing. 2022. ISBN 9781646220854.
The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex. New York, New York: Knopf. 2025. ISBN 9780593537237.
UI professor, author Melissa Febos talks about the books she keeps and why
Take a peek inside the home library of this author, whose new book, The Dry Season, publishes in June
Thursday, May 8, 2025
Written by Steve Schmadeke
Image Gallery
Like many writers, Melissa Febos recognizes her book-hoarding tendencies. She knows hard choices must be made before a book earns a spot in her collection, which spans a campus office and several floors of her Iowa City home.
“Books are at the center of my life,” says Febos, the bestselling memoirist, Guggenheim Fellow, and University of Iowa writing professor. “One of the beautiful things about living in Iowa is you have more space.”
A few minutes spent in the upstairs library and writing room of her Iowa City home makes her priorities clear. The sunlit space contains a wall of floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with nonfiction (biographies, essays, memoirs, self-help) and, on another wall, a built-in cabinet full of the notebook diaries she’s filled by hand since she was a child.
“On these bookshelves are the books that are dearest to me and the books that I am currently using in my work or that I expect to be using soon,” Febos says. For her latest book, The Dry Season, which chronicles a year she spent celibate before meeting her wife, (the acclaimed poet Donika Kelly, who is now an UI associate professor of English)that meant gathering stories of artists throughout history for clues to how they balanced passion and their art.
Melissa Febos in her home library
In this video, Melissa Febos shares more about the books she keeps and why.
Febos notes a few from the shelves: Savage Beauty, Nancy Milford’s biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay (“really just brimming with historical gossip, which is my favorite kind of biography”); Hermoine Lee’s biography, Virginia Woolf (“there’s so much beautiful writing about writing in there”); and Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Collette, by Judith Thurman (“one of the best biographies I’ve ever read”).
Because her library is also a workspace — Febos revised The Dry Season while walking on her treadmill desk — she says she keeps books that help “wind my artistic engine.” They include James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, and a dog-eared, underlined copy of Written on the Body, by Jeanette Winterson. “This book was kind of an awakening for me,” Febos says. “She’s the brainiest, sexiest writer I know of, and I was like, ‘Oh, I want to do that.’”
Both books are well-worn, with Febos’ mother’s old landline phone number scrawled inside the front cover of the latter. “I am a book annihilator,” Febos says. “The books I love best are destroyed. I don't live lightly in any way. I have relationships with books as objects in the way I have relationships with people — I interact with them a lot. I’m definitely not a person who puts them in a sleeve to save them.”
Books are a part of all of Febos’ relationships. Her wife Kelly’s hand can be seen in what alphabetical order there is on Febos’ shelves, like placingTara Westover’s memoir Educated next to Elissa Washuta’s memoir, White Magic (“one of the writers I love the most”).
“Everything I've ever learned in every relationship I've ever commenced has been at least partly based on the premise of the books that we love and that we share or that we want to argue over,” Febos says.
Standing before the shelves, Febos locates two of her most personal treasures. One is the book she stumbled across, drawn by its cover, in a Manhattan bookstore that launched the relationship with the person who became her wife in 2021.
“Here it is,” she says, pulling Kelly’s book, Bestiary, from a shelf. “(After buying it) I sat and read it in one sitting. At the end, I thought, ‘I need to meet this person.’ It wasn't a romantic thing. I was like, I need to meet the person behind this art because there's something really deep that I share with them.”
The two corresponded for months before meeting, getting to know each other as artists. On a shelf nearby is one of Febos’ other treasures — a poem Kelly surprised her with titled In the Beginning that sits in a silver frame ringed by flowers. “For M,” Kelly wrote at the top.
“She’s the most lovable person on the planet,” Febos says. The poem will be published in Kelly’s forthcoming collection, The Natural Order of Things.
Melissa Febos holds "The Book of Alchemy"
Melissa Febos holds "The Book of Alchemy," written by one of her former students.
Books were Febos' first love.
She grew up devouring them at the Falmouth, Massachusetts, public library, sometimes reading entire books after her mom dropped her off and writing down words she didn’t know in a notebook with a red velvet cover.
Febos still has some of her books from that era — E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (“It’s a beautifully written book — the sentences, you could just bounce a quarter off of them”) and Stuart Little (“It’s so whimsical — he falls in love with a bird”) and a boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia fantasy series by C.S. Lewis.
She doesn’t view books as investments, though, or collect first editions.
“My books are not worth anything to anyone else, but they are worth a lot to me,” she says. “I dog-ear and may leave books flat on the table — things that book collectors would just faint if they saw. I do have a deep, abiding love and respect for them; I think it just doesn't manifest as being careful with their glue.”
A small stack of books piled atop others on a shelf includes recent work from her Iowa colleagues — Space Struck, by Paige Lewis; Martyr!, by Kaveh Akbar; and Reproduction, by Louisa Hall. All three are also her neighbors in this quiet Iowa City neighborhood.
“I am the luckiest English professor in the world,” Febos says. “My colleagues are my best friends, and they're geniuses.” She effused, also, about the talents of her Nonfiction Writing Program colleagues—Tisa Bryant, Sarah Minor, Inara Verzemnieks, and John D’Agata. “I’m so lucky to be a part of this team.”
On a low, white, U-shaped table in the center of the room are six stacks of about 30 books. “This is the on-deck pile,” Febos says. “It’s sort of a managed chaos. There are books authors send me because they want blurbs, there are books that I dream of reviewing, there are books related to my projects.”
These include her former student Suleika Jaouad’s recently published The Book of Alchemy (“a great anthology of essays about journaling”) and Immodest Acts, by Judith C. Brown (“an extremely sexy book about this nun in Renaissance Italy”).
Being surrounded by books and making a living as a writer has been a lifelong dream for Febos.
“Books were my first, great love,” she says. “I aspire to be more of a minimalist person, but with books it's never happening.
“I have a fantasy of taking a whole sabbatical year one day just to catch up on reading.”
Point(s) of contact Office of Strategic Communication
IN CONVERSATION
Melissa Febos Tells Emily Ratajkowski What
She Learned From Her Year Without Sex
By Emily Ratajkowski
June 2, 2025
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Melissa Febos
Photo courtesy of Melissa Febos.
In her fifth book, The Dry Season, Melissa Febos trades sex for sovereignty, reframing celibacy as a radical act of self-ownership. Her new memoir chronicles her year of “withholding” in the wake of an intense relationship, the end of which prompted the Girlhood author to turn her attention inward as she reckoned with desire, control, and what it means to belong to oneself. “I wasn’t depriving,” she explained to the writer and model Emily Ratajkowski. “I was holding onto my energy.” When the two got on a call last month, Ratajkowski, the author of The New York Times best-selling memoir My Body, had just went through a chapter of celibacy herself, an experienced she found added clarity to her own writing (and made her a particularly scrupulous reader of Febos’s book). “There’s a really beautiful sentence about when you no longer have to acquiesce to men, you can dedicate your life to thought,” she told the author. In conversation, the two went deep on the art of seduction, the work of Sally Rooney, and a culture that turns intimacy into a barter system.
———
EMILY RATAJKOWSKI: First of all, it’s just great to see you.
MELISSA FEBOS: Oh my god, I know. To meet you.
RATAJKOWSKI: To meet you, because we have a lot of mutual friends.
FEBOS: We do.
RATAJKOWSKI: And it was fun reading The Dry Season because you describe New York, and it feels like we’ve probably walked by each other multiple times on the street.
FEBOS: Almost certainly.
RATAJKOWSKI: This morning I was thinking about your past work and the ideas and themes that run through The Dry Season. I reread your essay about consent for The New York Times that I just love so much. You reference empty consent a lot in The Dry Season and in the essay. For those who haven’t read it, you go to a cuddle party and it ends up being this amazing exercise in saying “no,” setting boundaries, and connecting to yourself. Would you say that choosing to be celibate was an extension of this exercise at the cuddle party?
FEBOS: Oh god. You are my dream reader. Everything I write, I’m basically writing it for you.
RATAJKOWSKI: I feel that sometimes, honestly.
FEBOS: But yeah, if in a cuddle party you’re doing a kind of role play, and then I went and did some research to figure out how to do the role play differently, this was yet another activity that would help build the instincts so that when I was in the moment, I wouldn’t fall back on my old conditioning to agree. I know this stuff is so deep for both of us. You write about it a ton in your book, how we’re sort of coerced to do things we don’t want to do—not just by a person in front of us, but by the story that’s living inside of us.
RATAJKOWSKI: Yeah, by ourselves.
FEBOS: Exactly. That it’s dangerous to not give people what they want from us. In The Dry Season, I had this horrific breakup after this horrific relationship, and I was like, “How have I been in relationships basically my whole life and be this bad at it?” I thought, “Okay, what’s wrong is not what’s happening on the surface of my thoughts, it’s in the basement. And I have to slow down so I can crawl down there and see what the fuck is going on.”
RATAJKOWSKI: Yeah. I feel like there’s a deep understanding of self that you’re reaching, not just in figuring out how you’re complicit, but what instincts have been built up in us to either disassociate, or the ambivalence we develop to protect ourselves essentially from touch or from love or from sex.
FEBOS: Yeah.
RATAJKOWSKI: I feel like indulgence is such a big part of the zeitgeist right now. It’s like, “Get that one more drink, girl! Buy that thing.”
FEBOS: “You deserve that little treat.”
RATAJKOWSKI: I’ve never been in addiction therapy, but I have friends who have, and I know how much withholding is a part of their life. I wanted to hear about what withholding means to you.
FEBOS: Well, I like the word withholding rather than celibacy, because one of my fears with this book was that people were going to be like, “Celibacy? That sounds dry and grim.” And when I think about the word “withholding,” I think about my process of taking my sexual energy, my romantic energy, my spiritual energy, and withholding it from other people, which is a way of keeping it for myself. I was withholding that energy and not spending it in those very familiar places and bankrupting myself. In the very early stages it felt like a kind of resistance But pretty quickly it felt like, “Oh, I get to keep all of this.”
RATAJKOWSKI: I guess translate it to abundance.
FEBOS: Totally. What do I want to do with all of this extra energy? Instead of being curious and obsessed with other people, I can be curious and obsessed with myself, or about my friendships or the world or art. And it really ended up being directed in all of those places over the course of the year. It was also my experience with sobriety where I thought, “Oh no, I’m going to give up drinks and alcohol and then I’ll never be able to laugh again. I’ll never make art again.” And it was exactly the opposite, where I had so much more fun. I had more to give to the things I actually cared about. I don’t look at my pattern in love and sex through the rubric of addiction, but it did really share that thing where it felt like, “Oh, I’m going to have less.” And then actually I had so much more.
RATAJKOWSKI: Yeah, one of the things that stuck with me is where you talk about not belonging to someone, but you belong to god. It’s funny, I remember saying to one of my good friends, “Sometimes I just want that person. I have to have them.” And she was like, “I don’t believe in having people.” And it made me think of this desperation that you find through this year of celibacy, whereas people are not something to have. You can experience another person.
FEBOS: That was really, really deep for me.
RATAJKOWSKI: I wanted to ask you this really broad question, because I’m really curious.
FEBOS: Go for it.
RATAJKOWSKI: How do you think we connect and love while remaining singular? How does one do that?
FEBOS: Well, I think this book is in many ways the story of me figuring out how to do that. How do I not limit my love to one person and kind of dump it down the drain of obsession and actually remain available to the world through art, through activism, through communing with nature? An interviewer recently used the word “selflessness.” That idea is just so fraught for women because, across centuries, we’re taught to give ourselves away and sacrifice ourselves at the altar of other people’s needs. I actually think that behavior—compromising my own boundaries, safety, and really my basic needs—does not bring me closer to other people. It brings me farther away from myself. I have to dissociate or estrange from myself in order to give myself away in that way. It’s self-objectification. And for me, actual love and connection and partnership and intimacy with other people depends upon re-engagement with ourselves, so that I can make voluntary choices and say, “I am choosing to make this act of love.” It’s not coming out of obligation, or coercion, or conditioning. I just needed to destroy those ideas.
RATAJKOWSKI: I really wanted to talk about the performance of seduction, because you were a dominatrix and then you’re a waitress, which are two professions that make you somewhat of an expert in intuiting needs and playing a role in order to appease another person. Obviously, I understand that you moved away from that when you found your now wife, and you’ve said there’s something so different now. There’s no performance; it’s just magnetism. But I’m curious, do you think there’s anything positive about that flirtation?
FEBOS: I totally do. As in so many things, and certainly always for me, it’s a matter of degree and application. In the context of my relationship, do I seduce my wife sometimes? Yes, absolutely. Do I like to put the whammy on her when we’re at a group dinner across the table just to watch her squirm? I love it. But I think when I was younger, and before I had this experience of celibacy and really scrutinized it, I was using that in place of self-esteem, in place of real connection with other people. I was creating chemistry where there wasn’t really chemistry. I was manipulating people that were inappropriate partners for me, or people that I wasn’t really that interested in just because I wanted them to like me.
RATAJKOWSKI: Validation, right?
FEBOS: Yeah. It was not cute to look at that and be like, “Oh, wow, I really have not thought of myself as a manipulative person. I thought I was just a romantic.” So I think it’s like, “Can I use that skill ethically?” Because life is full of performance, and that’s the beauty of it. Fashion is performance. Teaching is performance. What’s your experience with that?
RATAJKOWSKI: I don’t know. I moved to Brooklyn in the fall and there’s no paparazzi and it’s a much more quiet life, which I really like. I got a really bad haircut a month ago, and I didn’t even really care. I’ve spent most of my life really being self-aware and performing, and this is my season of not doing that. But what I loved in the book is how you take that performance and you put it towards something so positive, like conveying ideas to your students.
FEBOS: I do think performance has no moral value to it. It’s an art form. In many cases, it’s a skill, it’s a gift. It is an incredibly powerful form of communication. I think some of us just have it and it can be expressed in certain ways, and we can use it for evil or we can use it for good. And there’s a lot that’s mixed up in between.
RATAJKOWSKI: Yeah. I was thinking about that because when you’re performing, it’s obviously a manipulation, but it can feel really internal. And in the context of attention, there’s such a history of sexism around that, but then it’s also really powerful and maybe one of the tools that women have mastered so well. Is craving attention innately bad?
FEBOS: That is such a good question. As you were saying it, I was like, “Oh god, she’s lifting the log and all of the little patriarchal bugs are scurrying around.” Men who seek attention are seen as powerful or successful or magnetic. And women who draw attention are seen as embarrassing or–
RATAJKOWSKI: Desperate.
FEBOS: Yeah, desperate, pitiful. There is this glorious quote that I’ve carried around with me my whole life, but it’s basically saying that any woman who tries to liberate herself should expect to be treated like a dirty joke. Shame is what we try to do to women who accrue power in any way. Art is the quest for attention, sometimes with desperation in it. It’s not a female thing. It’s not a moral thing at all. That is a deeply human experience. The ability to draw attention is so powerful. When we think about activists, politicians, or people who are inducing empathy in others through storytelling, those are all forms of manipulation and forms of attention-seeking. They’re not coded female, so we’re not trying to denigrate or discourage them. But desperation is not a gendered experience. Humans are desperate mammals.
RATAJKOWSKI: One of the most interesting parts of the book is reading about how celibacy, for women throughout history, has been this pathway for freedom of thought. And there’s a really beautiful sentence in your book about when you no longer have to acquiesce to men, you can dedicate your life to thought. I actually just went through a period of celibacy and I had drinks with my friend. I was like, “I’ve noticed that I’ve really been able to write better.” And he said something so beautiful like, “Ultimately, making art or wanting sex and connection are both about seeking connection from other people, and so it makes sense that that energy would be interchangeable.”
FEBOS: That’s a smart friend. It is really true. It was definitely true for me. It’s always been true that that form of communication just never feels like a bad place to put my energy. It always multiplies. When I put my energy and my love into this form of communication, that is me trying to communicate with the world, but I’m not thinking of the world when I’m writing—I’m basically picturing you. I’m just thinking of someone who is coming to my experience in good faith, who shares it, who is interested and needs to hear it, because it’s a shared experience.
RATAJKOWSKI: This is another question that’s pretty big and broad, but has been on my mind a lot. In 2025, looking back on all these women who’ve been celibate or found ways to navigate sex in a way that allowed them to also be full people, what do you think we as women get from sex?
FEBOS: I think one of the mistakes that we make as a culture, and one of the mistaken ways that sex has been presented to us, is that it’s a single category of experience, that there should be one thing that we all get from sex. We should all get oxytocin and intimacy from sex, or we should all get orgasms from sex, or we should all get self-esteem from sex. There’s the whole cache of things that we’re told we should get from sex and a lot of them are contradictory. Something that I have learned is that it can be used to express so many things, even inside of one relationship. Like, sex inside of one relationship can be a form of catharsis. You can be working something out. You can be seeking closeness. It can be play. It can be somewhat autoerotic, like orgasm-seeking. It can be mutual masturbation. It can be a way of grieving together. The same way that hugging or talking or walking or meditating can be so many different things. I also talk about that a lot with my writing students. I feel like they’re afraid of writing sex scenes because it has to be a “good” sex scene. And I’m like, “What does that even mean outside of the context of your character’s lives?” It just is what it is, just like every other scene.
RATAJKOWSKI: That’s why I love Sally Rooney and the way she writes sex.
FEBOS: She’s so good.
RATAJKOWSKI: I love her politics, and there’s a lot of things I love about her writing, but I think the way she writes sex is so amazing because there’s a million different ways that she approaches what the characters are getting out of sex or what intimacy is. It’s often awkward and painful, but it’s really expansive. You don’t know what you’re going to get. There’s the spirituality in sex, the openness to experience and connection.
FEBOS: Exactly. It can include self-awareness, but it’s also self-forgetting. It’s like just showing up as a part of the universe with other parts of the universe interacting with them and not trying to control it, and not trying to extract something from the experience. Just being a part of.
RATAJKOWSKI: Yeah, this sort of quiet presentness, which does feel sort of the opposite of performance. I want to end on that note, but I don’t know.
FEBOS: That’s a good spot. Oh my god…
RATAJKOWSKI: That was so fun.
FEBOS: You are the best reader.
RATAJKOWSKI: I just feel lucky to be witness to it all.
She gave up sex for a year and gained control of her life
Melissa Febos, in a black turtleneck, leans in her chair.
Melissa Febos’ new book, “The Dry Season,” chronicles the surprising pleasures of a year of celibacy. (Beowulf Sheehan)
By Jessica Ferri
June 3, 2025 3 AM PT
3
On the Shelf
The Dry Season
By Melissa Febos
Knopf: 288 pages, $29
If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
After jumping from one relationship to the next, Melissa Febos found herself in bed with a woman she scarcely knew. “Though I stubbornly tried to prove otherwise, for me, sex without chemistry or love was a horror,” Febos writes in her new book, “The Dry Season.” “A few weeks later, I decided to spend three months celibate.”
On an unseasonably warm and sunny day in Seattle, I met Febos to talk about the surprising pleasure when those three months turned into a full year of celibacy. “I had been thinking of this time as a dry season, but it had been the most fertile of my life since childhood,” Febos writes. “I had run dry when I spent that vitality in worship of lovers. In celibacy, I felt more vital, fecund, wet, than I had in years.”
While giving up physical intimacy might sound like the opposite of titillating, those familiar with the demands of monogamy and motherhood could recognize the erotic potential of solitude. “A friend of mine took a trip without her toddler and said that the time she spent waiting in line to board was borderline erotic because it was a quiet time and space that she hadn’t had in years,” Febos said.
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At 44, Febos has already established herself as a prolific, critically acclaimed and bestselling writer of memoirs and creative nonfiction. “The Dry Season” is her fifth book. Her first, “Whip Smart,” chronicles her time as a professional dominatrix. “Abandon Me” tells of losing herself in a toxic relationship, struggling with addiction and discovering her biological father, and “Girlhood” is a collection of essays about being in a body that no longer belongs to her. Her most recent, “Body Work,” is a craft book on embodied writing.
THE DRY SEASON by Melissa Febos
(Knopf)
The physical body is clearly central to her writing — how it affects our work, our personal relationships and, most importantly, our relationship with ourselves. In a 2022 essay for the New York Times Magazine, Febos described her decision to undergo a breast reduction as a means to reclaim herself. In a society where bodily autonomy is under active and devastating attack, Febos’ work is not only provocative, it’s absolutely necessary.
In the flesh, it’s difficult to imagine Febos as anything but perfectly in control. She is warm, compassionate and easy to laugh. She’s proud of the work she’s done in recovery from addiction. Much of “The Dry Season” takes inspiration from programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, where the desire for a substance is in reality a desire to be closer to God.
It’s unsurprising then that Febos discovered that nuns were some of the first women to find freedom in celibacy. She was particularly interested in one medieval sect called the Beguines, who “took no vows, did not give up their property, and could leave the order anytime. They traveled, preached, and lived more independently than most women in the western world.” But it wasn’t necessarily that they rejected sex, as Febos writes, but rather a life focused on men. “The Beguines did not just quit sex, and it is likely many did not give up sex at all. They quit lives that held men at the center.”
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PARK CITY, UTAH - JANUARY 25: Writer/director Miranda July of “Kajillionaire,” photographed in the L.A. Times Studio at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday, Jan. 25, 2020 in Park City, Utah. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
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When Febos told a friend that she was going to take a break from sex, she rolled her eyes. It’s assumed that sex and love addicts are usually straight people, that it’s heterosexual men who are sex addicts and heterosexual women who are love addicts. “There was part of me that hoped I might be SLA [sex and love addict], because it could’ve been an easy answer,” Febos said.
Febos works to dismantle heteronormative stereotypes about love and sex in this book, quoting writer Sara Ahmed: “When you leave heterosexuality, you still live in a heterosexual world.” Later in the book, she discusses the uniquely queer and effective partnership of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. “I didn’t want to simply relocate within compulsory heterosexual gender roles,” she writes. “I wanted to divest from them.”
Febos said playfully, “I thank God every day that I am not straight. But we’re still socialized to behave a certain way. We all live under patriarchy. But I never had fantasies of marriage or of being a wife,” Febos said. “My dream was always to be a writer, an artist.”
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In “The Dry Season,” Febos processes some of the experience of being celibate through her friendship with a younger queer woman named Ray. Though there is sexual tension between them, the reconfiguring of desire helped Febos realize that some impulses aren’t worth acting on. Febos has taught creative writing in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Iowa for the past five years and considers herself lucky that she’s never felt attracted to her students. “Teaching helps me to be a better writer,” she said. “But it is partly about seduction, about being able to hold someone’s attention, to get them to feel something you feel passionately about or to help them see something they haven’t recognized before.”
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For Febos, the decision to take a step away from sexual intimacy is similar to the experience of understanding a text. “There is a difference between how you react to a text and how you analyze a text,” she writes. “You can be attracted or repelled by the content and still think critically about the response, about your own relationship to the text. As in love among humans, we cannot appreciate a text until we really see it, and in order to see it we have to get out of the way.” In other words, to truly understand your desire, you have to spend some time apart from it.
“The Dry Season” is no marriage plot. Even though Febos’ wife, poet Donika Kelly, who Febos met after her period of celibacy concluded, appears briefly at the end of the book, Febos resisted having her there at all. “That was truly not the point,” she said laughing, “to say, ‘Look, it all turned out great in the end!’ ” I told Febos that many women had confided in me (in response to reading Miranda July’s novel “All Fours”) that they felt obligated to participate in sex in their marriages with men. “That’s really the point of this book,” she responded. “Why are you having sex if you don’t want to be having sex? This radical honesty not only benefits you but it also benefits your partner. To me, that’s love: enthusiastic consent.”
Febos has reached the point in her career where she is in control. She told her agent that she would write a brief proposal for this book and nothing more, and it sold quickly. This is a freedom many writers will never achieve. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that Febos works not only on her craft but on herself. “My subject is myself, so this kind of work, in my relationships and with myself, is germane to my writing,” she said. Her inner work has been a wise investment, leading Febos to feel more freedom in her authorial vision, perhaps even moving toward fiction. “Writing is a process of integration for me,” she said. “I am so comforted by all of life’s surprises.”
September 20, 2025
It’s looking more and more like a two-person race for mayor, but Thursday’s debate could change all that! Or not. Today, we’re here to discuss self-love with Melissa Febos, learn more about how we’re sleeping (all wrong), and participate in a poll about something disgusting.
Emily Gould
BOOK GOSSIP
Melissa Febos Thinks Taylor Swift Should Experiment With Celibacy Her new book, The Dry Season, is out today, so we chatted about her year without sex, dating, or flirting (but with masturbation.)
Photo: Beowulf Sheehan
Today, Melissa Febos published her latest memoir, in which she details the year of her 30s that she spent abstaining from romance and sex (with other people, that is). While the Cut’s reviewer was annoyed that Febos found this mission too easy, the Washington Post praised her knack for “pairing structural rigor with emotional disclosure.” Speaking of disclosure, I know Melissa and we’re friends. Which is why it was comfortable for us to have a chat about, e.g., masturbation.
Do you have a response to people who grasp the premise of the book but are sort of like, Wait a minute, I can't get laid. I really can’t relate to this woman’s problem. You have a scene that addresses this directly in the book, where you're having lunch with your friend who is really hard up and hasn't had sex in a long time, and she says, "Fuck you, Melissa."
I mean, that was the very first thought I had immediately following the realization that I had a book's worth of things to say about the experience. I was like, Wait, everyone's going to laugh at me. Maybe that's always the first thought a memoirist has when they realize I have another memoir to write. And so I walked into the experience of writing the book wanting to be very conscious of that and fully willing to accept that it might be a fatal flaw.
But I also knew that during my year of abstinence, I had talked about what I was doing with a wide variety of people, and we found almost instantly that — after they finished laughing at me or telling me to fuck off and got a little bit more information — we had way more in common than we’d thought. We were both people with problems of extremity and people with a fraught relationship to aloneness or to coupledom. The analogy that always occurs to me, because I'm in recovery from disordered eating, is that bulimics and anorexics are in the same category of problems.
I don’t think I know many women who have a completely healthy relationship with sex, dating, and intimacy.
I mean, how do you have a healthy relationship with your body in a culture that objectifies, hates, fetishizes, and has tried to control bodies that appear like yours for centuries? To the extent that we become capable of it, I think it's pretty miraculous. And I think we have just as deranged and unhealthy a cultural relationship to love and sex as we do to women's bodies. It feels like magic that I've managed to recover from that definition of love and sex as much as I have.
I don't know if you're comfortable talking about this, but I have to ask you if you explored Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous?
I am in multiple forms of recovery and have a lot of 12-step recovery in other areas. So one of the questions that I carried into this experience was, Am I a sex and love addict? And particularly, Am I a love addict? I privately hoped that I was because I have had a really successful experience of recovery from addiction to other things. I wanted my problem to be one that had a really known solution and a community that I could just plug myself into. I truly identified with some aspects of it, but other aspects of it I didn't. It just isn't that simple for me.
I have had specific relationships that were definitely addictive, but broadly construed, it wasn't true over my whole history of love. I think a lot of my experiences reflected the ways that I'd been conditioned and socialized. What is a subjective problem? What is a cultural problem? Does it matter if you discern between them? Those questions were all the work of the book.
When you were making the rules for yourself, how did you go about setting those guidelines?
Well, by trial and error mostly, which was a little bit painful, and definitely humbling, and also pretty revelatory. I started with sex because that just seemed like the most obvious common denominator across all my relationships. And then I flirted with someone and was like, Oh, no, that is the problem. The exciting brain chemicals that just got released that I now want more of, that's the thing that I need to divest from. And so early on I was like, Okay, no flirting, no sexually charged friendships, none of that. I really need to not be preoccupied or engaged or chasing that feeling at all.
I considered refraining from masturbation as part of my celibacy. But it became clear to me pretty quickly that, actually, my autoerotic relationship was the healthiest sexual relationship I'd ever had. And, in fact, I wanted to bring a little bit more of those vibes into my interpersonal sexual relationships. In my autoerotic life, I related to myself with total unself-consciousness and acceptance and tenderness, yet it was really hard for me to access any of that when I was with other people because I was so focused on them.
I should probably masturbate more. I should put it in my Google calendar or something.
I do it to procrastinate a lot honestly. When I have a deadline, I'm like, Well, maybe I'll just watch some porn first. And I never feel bad about it afterwards. I don't ever judge myself for my fantasies. I never think about what I look like. It just feels like a pure, sensual, physical experience that I don't locate within a value system. And that is actually so refreshing to realize.
Who would you recommend a year of celibacy to?
I'm super-wary of prescription when it comes to other people's experience. But for me, every experience I've ever had of any kind of dependency was predicated on the illusion that I needed something or that I would feel deprived without it. And that story was always a lie. And so I guess the only prescription I would make is that if a person has a relationship to something that feels dependent and causes them pain, there might be a really surprising amount of freedom on the other side of setting it down. And it's okay to start small. A day is the perfect unit of abstinence for me because that usually feels manageable. I started with three months.
But I have a long secret list in my head of people who I think should experiment with celibacy, but I can't share that with you or anyone. I mean, you know who, don't you? Of your friends and loved ones?
Because of my job, I immediately thought of celebrities.
Oh God, I don't want to get in trouble. But I mean all of them. I feel like there are so many of them that are just like, Ugh, let's try another one. Ugh, that didn't work. Let's try another one. Let's try another one. And anyone who sort of seems to be shuttling through relationships, they might need to become the right person before they find the right person.
Should we send this book to Taylor Swift?
I mean, I'm not going to say that I pictured her face in my mind when you asked me that question, but yes, I did.
In 2016, bestselling memoirist Melissa Febos made a resolution to be celibate for three months. She knew that for many people this would not be particularly difficult or a daunting proposition--or even something they would think of as a choice. But for her it was a substantial change.
At 35, following the devastating end of the toxic romance that is the subject of her sophomore outing, the Lambda Literary Award finalist Abandon Me, it would be her longest period of abstinence since early adolescence. And that was before she expanded the time frame from three months to six.
Nine years later, this experience serves as the basis of The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex, coming from Knopf in June. "At the time, the whole thing felt sort of embarrassing," Febos says, speaking via Zoom from the treadmill desk in her sun-drenched, bookshelf-lined home office in Iowa City. "I didn't even really want to talk about it too much. I had no idea I was going to write about it."
Indeed, Febos says she never knows she's going to write about an experience while she's in the midst of it. "I think it always sounds sort of inconceivable when I say that," she says. "But I'm the queen of hiding the obvious from myself. I have to, so that I can live my truth without engaging the stenographer inside my brain too heavily."
Now 44 and with four books under her belt, Febos is a disarming combination of casual, charismatic, and confident over Zoom. Her raven hair is pulled back, her striking blue eyes are framed by clear plastic glasses, and she's wearing what she explains is a semiironic sweatshirt that reads simply, "SPORTS."
Though she never conceives of her present moment as fodder for a future book, Febos has been a devoted diarist since her childhood in Falmouth, Mass., where she was raised by her therapist mother and her adoptive father, a sea captain. "As a kid, I sensed that there were parts of myself that were less acceptable or comfortable for other people," she explains. "So, journaling had a pragmatic purpose psychologically and socially: it was where I could express things that I didn't feel comfortable revealing in my daily life. Writing was necessary for me very early on. As soon as I figured out that a writer was a thing you could be, I couldn't imagine being anything else."
Determining that high school was not going to help her become a writer, she dropped out at 16, opting to get her GED. An oftenrestless sensation seeker with what she now thinks was probably undiagnosed ADHD, she moved out of her family home and headed to Boston, where she worked odd jobs and took night classes at Harvard Extension School. She also developed the beginnings of what would become a serious drug problem.
Two years later, Febos enrolled at the New School for her BA. During her time in New York City, she worked as a dominatrix-partly to support herself and partly for the novelty of the experience--and became increasingly dependent on heroin, subjects she explores in depth in her debut, Whip Smart. "After writing that, I thought, Oh good. Now I never have to write about sex work or addiction ever again," she says. "But that was, like, hilariously naive."
As the subject of her own books, retreading material is somewhat inevitable. "I try to strike a balance somewhere between trusting new readers to keep up and trusting returning readers to remember," she says. The period covered in The Dry Season is a direct result of the dissolution of the fraught relationship at the center of Abandon Me. Following that heartbreak, and several unsatisfying situationships, Febos was in need of a romantic reset. "So that's where it slots into the timeline of my life. But aesthetically it's number five for sure."
In each book she's written, Febos says, she's attempted to take on a new set of "structural and aesthetic concerns" that she's "not entirely comfortable with" to keep herself from becoming bored. Initially, she conceived of The Dry Season as an essay in her collection Girlhood, but the page count quickly ballooned. Still, she was not convinced there was enough meat on its bones to sustain a full-length work.
"That was a transformative year, but it was also one of the happiest years of my life," she says. "I'd never tried to write about happiness before; I wasn't sure there would be enough conflict."
To beef up the story, she imagined weaving her experience giving up romantic love and lust--chronicling frequent temptations, a foray into a sex addict support group, and a whole new way of moving through the world--into a "global history of liberatory female celibacy." But, laughing, she says, "The idea that I would be able to fit all that together sounds totally deranged to me now."
While not quite so ambitious, the finished product does contain mountains of Febos's research into historical figures, from Sappho to the beguines to Virginia Woolf--much of which was conducted during her celibate year. "It's a thing I always do when trying to make sense of my experience," she says. "I make a study of it. I'm reading a book, I'm having intellectual conversations about celibacy with people, and all the time I am trudging toward the reality of what it actually means in the context of my life."
Reconstructing her personal narrative in richly embodied and often surprisingly sensual prose required its own kind of research, including combing through old journals and interviewing her friends about their experience of that year. Adding these outside perspectives allowed her to address any potential skepticism about her project head-on. "So, you're going to give up sex for three months?" she quotes one friend as saying. "Fuck you, Melissa."
"How could I write this book and not have a sense of humor about it?" Febos asks. "I know that what's transformative in one person's life is not guaranteed to have that same effect in another's, but I trust that people will see the relative radical nature of this experience in my life."
At the end of 2016, Febos met the poet Donika Kelly, her future wife--a love story that puts a sweet button on her celibate season, though initially she didn't want to include it in the book, telling her editor, Knopf's Vanessa Haughton, that she intended to cut off the narrative just before their meeting. "She was like, 'You're joking,'" Febos says. "But I didn't want to distract from my true aim, which had nothing to do with finding a partner. Really, before I met Donika, I believed that I would never be in another romantic relationship because I felt so complete on my own."
As she concluded a draft of The Dry Season, however, Febos says she realized it would be unfaithful to the integrity of the story to leave it out: "Because that's literally what happened. I feel like meeting her was a consequence of the change that I underwent that year."
The true substance of that change, Febos says, was a "spiritual awakening" that saw her embrace a new, more expansive definition of love. "The beguines have a saying that sits really deep in me now," she says. " All for all.' That's the goal. It's not me for me, or you for me, or even me for you. It's all for all." Later, she adds, "This isn't a book about romantic love, or sexual love, or any kind of capitalist idea of love, or, like, pop song love. But it is a book about true love."
By PHOEBE CRAMER
"MELISSA FEBOS TOLD ME THAT SHE'S HEADING STRAIGHT FROM OUR INTERVIEW TO A TATTOO APPOINTMENT TO COVER UP A WHOLE BUNCH OF REGRETTABLE TATTOOS' ON HER LOWER BACK."
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
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Cramer, Phoebe. "With Pleasure: The latest memoir from Melissa Febos explores how a year of celibacy changed her life and, against all odds, helped her find true love." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 15, 14 Apr. 2025, pp. 16+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A836572438/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=897fedd1. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.
The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in My Year Without Sex
Melissa Febos. Knopf, $28.99 (288p)
ISBN 978-0-593-53723-7
*"At the age of thirty-five, it was time to meet myself unmediated by romantic and erotic obsession," writes memoirist Febos (Body Work) in the opening pages of this bold account. After two decades of moving from one relationship to the next, with only a "few brief periods of singleness" in between, Febos went through a particularly devastating breakup and decided to abstain from sex and dating for a year. "I liked the idea of choosing celibacy not as a last-resort treatment for depression, not as a deprivation, but as an attempt to grow my world," she explains. She examines the history of abstinence in religious and cultural contexts through the work of writers including Virginia Woolf and Octavia Butler, and explores what it meant to her, as a queer, 21st-century feminist. The results, Febos found, were freeing: she relished waking up alone, reading and writing on her own schedule, and pursuing her interests unmediated by the concerns of another. Though she's wary of acting "as an evangelist for celibacy," Febos convincingly makes the case for serial daters to slow down and reflect on their past relationships free from the cloud of a current entanglement. As fascinating as it is liberating, this is not to be missed. Agent: Ethan Bassoff, WME. (June)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
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"The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in My Year Without Sex." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 16, 21 Apr. 2025, p. 40. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837361785/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6b8d80bc. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.
I can't tell you the immense pleasure I got from reading The Dry Season alone in a hotel room. It was late March when AWP brought me to Los Angeles, and I was done socializing for the day. The new Lucy Dacus album had just come out, and it played softly while I turned page after page, wearing nothing but the white hotel robe. Delicious. When your favorite artists are in conversation with each other, you can find hints of the divine in every image, every metaphor. You can see the connective sinew flexing. In my body, I felt part of the conversation. Over email, I had the chance to make that conversation external. As a spiritual writer that turns to Melissa Febos's work for clarity and revelation, it was nothing short of a miracle. Writing within the mystic tradition, Febos's The Dry Season is a stunning translation of her faith in art and in the self.
Melissa Febos
The Dry Season
Knopf, 2025
Hannah Burns (RAIL): In The Dry Season you say, "I was wary of acting like an evangelist for celibacy, though in truth I would have liked to prescribe it to many." Do you consider your books to have an instructive quality?
Melissa Febos (M.F.): I wouldn't say instructive, more like demonstrative. Most of what I have learned in life has been through my own and others' lived experience, both demonstrated and shared, and not through prescription. So, I don't have a lot of faith in prescription. If I ever speak in the imperative or the second person in my work, it's reflexive. I am interested in showing that certain things are possible, but I want to show myself first, and then invite the reader to witness my process.
RAIL During your celibate period, you decided that flirting had to be part of the temporary ban. In The Dry Season, you talk about turning on a certain charm, tapping into that self-possessed magnetism in order to draw people to you. I wonder if you tap into that feeling at all when you write. Your work has a distinct charisma, the voice is magnetic. Is writing like flirting, then? Trying to win the reader's attention, and perhaps affection?
M.F. [Laughs] No it really isn't. But thanks, I think. Perhaps in my early drafts, or in my work as a much younger writer there was a bit of flirting, the enactment of that kind of charisma. But the goal of my work is different from the goal of flirting. I don't write in order to draw people to me. I write in order to get closer to truth. To open my heart and progress my thinking. If seduction is a kind of glamour or spell, then memoir is a spell-breaker. I want to wake up through writing, not enter a fantasy. I believe that truth has its own charisma, as does confidence, as does beauty. I don't usually begin in truth, confidence, and beauty, but my goal is to get there--they are contingent on each other, and loosely in that order. My hope is that the magnetism of my work, insofar as it exists, exists as a combination of those elements. That's what compels me as a reader.
RAIL Between figures like Hildegard of Bingen and Virginia Woolf, looking at examples of radical women living toward their higher purpose was inspiring. Seeing that connection between feminism, love, divinity, and the act of creation seems like a fruitful place to find hope and meaning under this administration. In The Dry Season you say, "there was no more injustice today than there had been in the Middle Ages, and still those women found ways to manifest a consecrated life." It is hard to have faith right now, and to trust the future. How do you respond when your faith is shaken?
M.F. Well, my faith is not in the state, a political system, a church, or any individual humans, so it is less vulnerable to being shaken by the disruptions or failures of those things. I believe in art, nature, in the power of communities, in my communities, concerted work toward a life based in justice and love, and that all of those are much higher powers than me. What I experience, rather than shaken faith, is grief, fear, and anger. Those are emotional experiences, and my first instinct is usually to try and avoid them, but I have a lot of practice not responding from my first instinct. Feelings want and need to be felt, and if they aren't, they can create a lot of harm and misdirection. So, I try to just feel it all. Then, I can think more clearly about if there's an action for me to take, and if there is, it's usually something to do with that list of things I have faith in.
RAIL You study female mystics and write in the lineage of "the truly faithful, who live in recognition of the infinite divine." The Beguines, Audre Lorde, Margery Kempe. Scenes come to me fully formed at times, and I wonder if they are visions. Like Agnes Martin obeying her vision of the grid. You are translating your humanity, your "sense of the divine," in everything you write. Do you have visions? Do you identify as a mystic or simply in the mystic tradition?
M.F. I feel really flattered by the suggestion, but no, I don't identify as a mystic. But I suppose I do identify as practicing within a mystic tradition, in the sense that I seek awareness of my spiritual oneness with something bigger than myself. I seek conscious contact with higher powers. I'm generally a pretty spiritual person and always have been (which I write about in The Dry Season), and I do think of art as a partially mystical practice. I wrote in Body Work about the connections, both analogical and direct, between artmaking (especially memoir), direct spiritual communion, and therapeutic methods.
I spent a lot of time with mystics while writing this book and while living the time that the book describes because I craved the companionship and guidance of women who were also seeking kinds of truth that are not limited to intellectual comprehension, that are beyond the intellect. I wanted to get around my thoughts, to the sticky core of me, where I understand things like love in a more sublime sense. I like a brainy revelation, don't get me wrong, but in art I am after something bigger than that, something that engages the heart and conscience, and draws upon an intelligence that is distinct from the one that quotes Michel Foucault or whatever, you know? I suspect it's the same one that Hildegard and Agnes of Rome and Hadewijch were after.
I've received a lot of surprising wisdom from my own art. Maybe visions are just what we call the transmissions from that other, more mysterious intelligence. The muse or God or the unconscious or Self or the shadow--people have come up with a lot of models for explaining it across human history.
RAIL Writing can be incredibly vulnerable, so it is hard to write when you are trying to avoid feeling embarrassed. I often feel acute embarrassment anytime I share something I have written. Is it just a matter of choosing to accept that embarrassment, as part of the human condition, instead of avoiding it? Or does the blushed feeling just recede over time? Are you still able to frame your writing as a "private exercise" or do you no longer need that illusion of privacy?
M.F. Your question makes me think about what embarrassment really is. Like, it's distinct from humiliation. I guess it's just fear of being seen. Exposing something that could be weaponized against me, maybe? Some part of me that doesn't fit into the story I want to tell about myself. It's an interesting thought. And yeah, it does recede over time. Or rather, it recedes over the length of writing a thing. One way of describing my writing process is that I face the embarrassing thing until it no longer embarrasses me. Until it becomes not dangerous or shameful or weak, but beautiful, a kind of strength. And that final form is its true form.
I do still promise myself at the beginning of everything I write that I don't have to ever show it to anyone. And the privacy that promise affords me is not an illusion; it is real. I mean it every time. I write alone. And I only invite readers in when I am no longer embarrassed, but love the thing I've seen and made.
RAIL You say "the trick of shame is that it only becomes visible once you set it down." Does this mean externalizing shame, through the act of writing?
M. F. For me it does. Writing is not the only mechanism that helps me recognize and set down shame--therapy, meditation, and maybe most of all intimate conversations with friends and my partner are all instrumental as well--but writing is often the starting point for me. I think it often is for memoir, because one of the tasks of the memoirist is to shear away the false stories that surround their own experience, and that's one way to describe shame: as a very compelling, but ultimately false story about oneself.
RAIL If writing is a spiritual practice for you, what are you worshipping with the act of it? You call art "that most reliable higher power." What shape does the infinite divine ultimately take for you?
M.F. I guess I think worship is just another word for devotion or communion. A kind of opening to a connection that pre-exists. I do see writing as an act of devotion or communion. I've heard people describe prayer as talking to God, and meditation as listening. I like that, though I don't really experience my own prayer and meditation that way. Writing, however, is a space for both talking and listening. It is one of the places where I get closest to myself, where I am most inside my own lived experience, and where I most easily access my feeling of connectedness with something greater. That, and faced with the ocean, or otherwise in nature. And through intimacy with other people, and their art. But I think writing is the beginning of all of it for me. It's the place where I am always waking up, even when the rest of life makes me want to shut down.
RAIL How is it to share your time and space with another writer? Do you alternate tending to each other, taking turns being "art monsters" and giving yourself fully to your writing? Has your writing practice changed since Donika came into your life?
M.F. It's the best! I mean, it can be challenging sometimes, but I am always grateful to share a home and so much of my time with someone who understands my relationship to art, and who has an equally deep, and quite similar, relationship to her own practice. We have very different habits in terms of what we need to get our work done, but for both of us it means a meaningful amount of time apart, and alone. We are good at making that space for each other. And I love that we can talk about it all the time--that we talk about our processes, our projects, our challenges, what we're reading, how it filters into our teaching--it's such a gift to share these aspects of our lives and get to deepen and support each other around them. Before we met I thought it would be much harder, too hard, really--but it works quite well. Every long term relationship is a lot of consistent work, but our relationship as artists is pretty simple and lovely.
Hannah Burns, originally from Charleston, SC, received her MFA in Fiction from the New School. Her writing can be found in Atwood Magazine, The Crawfish, Public Seminar, Platform Review, Y'ALL! Zine, KGB Lit, and the Brooklyn Rail. She lives in Brooklyn and works for the Urbane Arts Club.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The Brooklyn Rail, Inc.
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Burns, Hannah. "MELISSA FEBOS with Hannah Burns." The Brooklyn Rail, June 2025, pp. 102+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A847202812/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=188c4680. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.
It's unequivocally true that Melissa Febos knows how to write about sex and relationships. We knew that as far back as her debut memoir, 2010's Whip Smart, about her years working as a dominatrix in a Manhattan dungeon, which contains more descriptions of enemas than I ever needed. So you may be surprised to hear that sex is the least interesting part of Febos' books. Her slim 2022 guide to personal narrative, Body Work, includes a limber essay on writing sex scenes that should be applied to writing any scene well--or to simply existing.
"Writing is, like gender or dominatricing, a kind of performance," she writes in Body Work. "But the craft of writing is primarily an art of making decisions. I often like to terrorize my students by insisting that every single notation--every piece of punctuation, every word, every paragraph break--in a piece of writing is a decision...Not in the first draft, or even the fifth, but by the end, I want to have stripped as many tics and defaults, as many blind choices as is in my power. I want to be awake to all my choices."
Febos, who has been a professor in the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program since 2020, is in relentless pursuit of making her own choices. When I write relentless, I do suggest obsessiveness, but I also mean unremitting, a heartbeat. This verdant energy is at the very heart of Febos' fifth book, the nourishing and bold The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex--which is why it's funny that Febos genuinely thought it was just going to be a "sharp little book" that was "very small and very tight."
And it certainly could've been. The first half of The Dry Season would, on its own, be a bestseller in the spirit of Body Work. It's the story of a woman who chooses to take a hiatus from sex and romance after a "ruinous two-year love affair" that was, in Febos' words, "more painful than kicking heroin, than the migraine that split my skull at sixteen and the spinal tap that followed." Febos refers to these toxic years as the "Maelstrom," a term, she notes, introduced to the English language by Edgar Allan Poe's 1841 short story "A Descent Into the Maelstrom," about a monstrous whirlpool that sucks in boats and leaves its victims haggard and destroyed. (It is only near the end of The Dry Season that Febos reveals to readers that the Maelstrom is the same relationship that was described in her second memoir, Abandon Me.)
Yet the Maelstrom is a crucible that leads to a year of great change, in which Febos explores obsession, shame, addiction, sobriety and the burden of being "yoked by the desire of others," topics she has covered in all her books. She figures out what celibacy means to her and makes an inventory of former lovers. She takes a hard look at her role models, such as French author Colette and Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose lives were defined by love, passion and, consequently, pain. She also finds some new role models: the Middle Age lay nuns known as beguines, Christian mystics like Hildegard von Bingen, the Greek poet Sappho and more.
At the end of her experiment, her revelations are ascendant, transcendent: "I had flung myself against other bodies like a mystic in rapture, wet at both ends, face bright with tears," she writes. "I had nursed the softest parts of women, made a sacrament of them no less holy than the blood and the body of any other savior. I wouldn't take back a moment of it. I wouldn't return to it, either." It's a perfect point to end a book--but Febos is just getting started.
"When my wife [poet Donika Kelly] read the full manuscript for the first time, she was like, 'Here's your off-ramp...[but] I don't think you should end it there,'" Febos says. "After the revelation is always more interesting than what leads up to it. It's harder to summarize. It's harder to publicize or market. But that's what I'm looking for."
This second half of The Dry Season is a ferocious opening up to Febos' divine creative purpose unlike anything you might expect from the best book this year to feature artfully covered nipples on its cover. She dives further into the lives of the beguines and the words of von Bingen, in particular the mystic's concept of viriditas, "the greening power of God," which Febos points to as a perfect term to describe her "own sublime sense of the everythingness around me."
This sublime everything is what Febos discovers in her year of celibacy, and then she goes further to show how she maintains her relationship to that divine spark while going about her daily life and even after she returns to the sexual landscape. "When you don't belong to anyone, you belong to everyone," an Italian scholar named Silvana Panciera, who specializes in the beguines, tells Febos. "You feel able to love without limits...When you don't belong to anyone you belong to God."
"This is totally a love story," Febos says, "but it's a love story between me and my friends, and me and these women I'll never meet who are showing me how I want to live...[The beguines'] refrain was 'all for all.' Love is how we care for the people in our community. It's how we care for each other. It's our artistic practice. It is our defiance of a hostile government. It's living according to our deepest and truest beliefs, and it's participating in a tradition that is as old as human history, which is particularly helpful right now. I'm so glad I got to spend some years reading about these medieval women who were like, sure, we might be killed or raped as soon as we step outside the wall of our beguinage, but we're definitely going to keep illegally preaching and tending to the sick and doing ecstatic dance and song every night with our women."
For all the spiritual goodness that Febos shares in The Dry Season, it's also her funniest book--not outright hilarious, but cheeky and wry, with the possibility that this element of her writing may become stronger in future books. Febos, who is a little silly but in a very sexy, cool, smart way--is clearly delighted to see her natural sense of humor start to make its way into her work.
"When people meet me, they're always [intimidated] because they think I'm going to be like, hi, I'm Professor Dominatrix. Nice to meet you," Febos jokes. "[But] I think I saved all of the heavier parts of myself and my experience for my writing, because I didn't feel comfortable expressing them...I have four books of processing behind me, so in this book, I actually feel like it's much more representative of the personality that the people in my life know."
To write comfortably about one's year of zero sex requires a sense of humor. It's also the sign of an author who has--to use a cliche--come into her voice. Earlier this year, Febos wrote on her Substack about how memoirists are often secretive: "The idea that memoirists are oversharers who crave attention is erroneous," she wrote. "We are usually people who have hidden large swaths of ourselves in order to appeal to others, to feel safe. By the time we write our memoir, those concealed parts have become too heavy to bear." Many of Febos' earlier books, in particular Abandon Me, showcase a much more lyrical style of writing than in The Dry Season. In those works, her secrets are wrapped in beautiful language, veiled in poetry. In The Dry Season, her lyricism is deployed only when she chooses to obscure; otherwise, she is crisp and clear, her literary comparisons as sharp as Salman Rushdie's, her writing voice much more akin to her speaking voice.
The Dry Season returns to the more traditional narrative structure of her first book; it is chronological, with a clear arc from beginning of the celibacy project to the end. But all the elements from her previous books--narrative tension, lyrical language, research and reportage--appear effortless. "I think with this book, it just felt easier," she says. "I was comfortable with all of those tools, and it felt much more instinctive. I had developed an ear for my own aesthetic toolkit and also my own instincts on the page, so I was able to sort of bring things in when I needed them. There is a comfort and a confidence that I think I feel inside my own voice that is different than it's ever been."
"How do you write a book about being happy?" Febos says. "I've never done that before." The Dry Season is exquisite, expansive and joyful--a stunning book on creativity, and Febos' best yet.
-Cat Acree
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 BookPage
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Acree, Cat. "Eyes wide open: How Melissa Febos fell in love with her divine creative spark during a year of celibacy." BookPage, June 2025, pp. 10+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A840852553/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8bcc0806. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.
The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex. By Melissa Febos. June 2025. 288p. Knopf, $29 (9780593537237). 814.
In the aftermath of a harrowing, obsessive relationship (chronicled in Abandon Me, 2017), Febos (Body Work, 2022) embarked on a period of celibacy, a plan that drew both eyerolls and nods of self-recognition from her closest friends. This searching, cerebral memoir chronicles the experiment, which turned out to be not a "dry season" but "the most fertile of my life since childhood." Febos created an "inventory" of past relationships, turning over stones to unearth countless new epiphanies. She found guidance from a lineage of faithful kindred spirits, from medieval beguines and mystic nuns through Simone Weil and Audre Lorde, even visiting the homelands of Hildegard von Bingen and Virginia Woolf. Closing off the possibility of sexual connection, Febos found within herself "a light that shone not on specific objects, but illuminated everything in proximity." Also inspired by her idols to "write like a demon," University of Iowa professor Febos does so, dizzily. A consummate builder of words and conveyer of ideas, Febos' keen writing about sex, gender, and addiction is in a class of its own.--Annie Bostrom
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Bostrom, Annie. "The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 19-20, June 2025, p. 16. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A847197849/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fc2e6af3. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.