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.”
“There is a comfort and a confidence that I think I feel inside my own voice that is different than it’s ever been.”
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 Maelström,” 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.)
“This is totally a love story, 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.”
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.
Read our starred review of ‘The Dry Season’ by Melissa Febos.
“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.”
“After the revelation is always more interesting than what leads up to it.”
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 cliché—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.
“I see my first book very much as I was learning how to tell a story,” she says. “It’s a very traditionally plotted story. It was the best thing I’d ever written at that point. I was really trying to figure out how to do that inner and outer work and also make a work of art that’s not boring for other people, because I’m allergic to being bored.”
“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.”
With The Dry Season, she has returned 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.
Photo of Melissa Febos ©Beowulf Sheehan