On Sale June 3, 2025
The Dry Season
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An examination of the solitude, freedoms, and feminist heroes Melissa Febos discovered during a year of celibacy. A wise and transformative look at relationships and self-knowledge.
In the wake of a catastrophic two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break—for three months she would abstain from dating, from relationships, and sex. Her friends were amused. Did she really think three months was a long time? But to Febos, it was. Ever since her teens, she had been in one relationship after another. As she puts it, she could trace a “daisy chain of romances” from her adolescence to her mid-thirties. Finally, she would carve out time to focus on herself and examine the patterns that had produced her midlife disaster. Over those first few months, she gleaned insights into her past and awoke to the joys of being single. She decided to extend her celibacy not knowing it would become the most fulfilling and sensual year of her life. No longer defined by her romantic pursuits, she learned to relish the delights of solitude, the thrill of living on her own terms, the sensual pleasures unmediated by lovers, and the freedom to pursue her ideals without distraction or guilt. Bringing her own experiences into conversation with those of women throughout history—from Hildegard von Bingen, Virginia Woolf, and Octavia Butler to the Shakers and Sappho—Febos situates her story within a newfound lineage of role models who unapologetically pursued their ambitions and ideals.
By abstaining from all forms of romantic entanglement, Febos began to see her life and her self-worth in a radical new way. Her year of divestment transformed her relationships with friends and peers, her spirituality, her creative practice, and most of all her relationship to herself. Blending intimate personal narrative and incisive cultural criticism, The Dry Season tells a story that’s as much about celibacy as its inverse: pleasure, desire, fulfillment. Infused with fearless honesty and keen intellect, it’s the memoir of a woman learning to live at the center of her own story, and a much-needed catalyst for a new conversation around sex and love.
​Praise for The Dry Season​
“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.”
—Publisher’s Weekly, starred review
“Although a book about abstention, at its essence this story is about understanding, reclaiming, and celebrating pleasure, rendered sublimely and with wit. A gorgeous and thought-provoking memoir about how celibacy can teach us about love.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Febos has written beautifully, brilliantly about her body, mind and that divine light we call, perhaps too simply, the spirit. Her personal narratives about obsession, sex, romance, addiction, art-making and the pressures placed on female bodies are written with candor, brio and compassion for herself and others…In her crystalline memoir The Dry Season, she gives up sex and finds her sublime purpose, and it’s her most triumphant work to date.”
—BookPage, starred review
“A consummate builder of words and conveyer of ideas, Febos's keen writing about sex, gender, and addiction is in a class of its own.”
—Booklist
“As a queer memoirist, Febos provides a sorely needed perspective on the cultural trope of the ‘incel,’ presenting instead a model for celibacy that is self-guided rather than socially imposed and compassionate rather than punitive; this book should be required reading for anyone who’s ever been told to “just take a break from relationships.”
—VOGUE
“Thought-provoking…Mixing personal narrative with cultural criticism, the author of Girlhood explores how celibacy radicalized her, giving her permission to put all of her focus on herself, her work, and the platonic relationships that deserved more of her attention.”
—TIME
“[The Dry Season] reveals Febos at her sharpest as she chronicles the year she spent celibate…As much as it’s a book about celibacy, it is also a book about recovery and attention. Who does a person become when they cede their life to infatuation? And how does one return to the things they most love after losing a lover?”
—Vulture
“[Febos’s] celibacy was not an escape but a deep inquiry into desire, intimacy, and autonomy—a way to interrogate how socialized narratives of love and devotion had shaped her identity as a queer woman…Ultimately, the memoir asks readers to consider what our lives might look like if we stopped orienting them around the desire to be desired.”
—Harper’s Bazaar
“[A] delicious memoir of sensuality and desire . . Juicy and thoughtful and lovely.”
—Lit Hub
“Febos’s great power as a writer is pairing structural rigor with emotional disclosure…in The Dry Season, Febos plumbs the restless depths of her own seeking by entwining her compulsive self-discovery with curiosity about a wide range of writers.”
—The Washington Post
“This is no recovery handbook, but a seamless feminist how-to rooted in the ancient histories of women who’ve found their way before us. Febos’s writing and research, paired with her bare, zero-percent-flowery confessions make her the high-brow/low-brow, cool genius nerd hero we love.”
—The Stranger
“Writing within the mystic tradition, Febos’s The Dry Season is a stunning translation of her faith in art and in the self.”
—The Brooklyn Rail
“An emotionally explosive memoir that looks honestly at our desire for pleasure and fulfillment in our lives.”
—Chicago Review of Books
“Profound”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Melissa Febos is straight-up one of the most essential memoirists today, each of her books a deeply profound exploration of the mind and the body and the complex relationship between them. . . It’s a testament to Febos’s incredible skill that a book centered on celibacy features some of the most erotic writing she’s ever put to paper . . . Of course, Dry Season is not just about celibacy; it’s a treatise on listening to and trusting our corporeal instincts, on finding authentic forms of pleasure independent from hegemonic scripts. It’s a book that is itself a pleasure.”
—Electric Lit
“Blistering prose, the kind that you might want to get tattooed on your arm…Melissa invigorates her own stories with references from religion and art, literary theory and philosophy, in a way that feels enriching rather than academic, all the while maintaining a clear eye in her depictions of other people and herself.”
—The Maris Review
“In The Dry Season, Febos interweaves her own narrative with research and reflections on desire that will keep you thinking well beyond the last page.”
—Bustle
“Febos’s work is not only provocative, it’s absolutely necessary.”
—Los Angeles Times
“As I read, Febos’s celibacy challenge went from feeling like a humblebrag to a deeply relatable effort. And as she settled into her solitude, her observations began to resonate. She details parts of singlehood that I, too, have treasured—and which I’ve heard extolled again and again in my reporting on romance, even from people whose celibate season resulted from a dearth, not an excess, of options.”
—The Atlantic
“The Dry Season is a masterclass in the craft of memoir. Febos demonstrates that self-creation, like self-writing, is fundamentally an act of collective creation, or cocreation.”
—Women’s Media Center
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“Melissa Febos is a writer of singular wisdom and compassion, and The Dry Season is an utterly consuming and deeply generous book—an illuminating exploration of solitude and partnership, intimacy and manipulation, the stories we tell ourselves about the choices we make and how we might unlearn those stories to see ourselves more clearly. Reading this book, I felt an ecstatic, nerve-tingling gratitude, like it was written just for me—finding such crisp, incisive language for emotional knots I’ve felt caught inside for years—but part of the joy of this feeling was knowing how many people will feel the same way: that this book was written just for them.”
—Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters
“Melissa Febos’s The Dry Season will be called a book about abstinence, about celibacy, but it’s so much more than that. This is a book about obsession, compulsion, about self and self-lessness, about sex and love and art and faith and the capacity of each to swallow us whole, to obliterate us, make us anew alit with our history instead of engulfed by it. Febos talks back to time as she unravels it, inviting everyone into the conversation from Hadewijch to Hildegard, Foucault to Lorde, St. Augustine to Annie Dillard. The Dry Season is about reenchanting oneself with the world. It’s the best book yet by one of contemporary non-fiction’s lodestars.”
— Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
“The Dry Season is brilliant and powerful meditation upon addiction, desire, seduction, and the undervalued (and all-too-unexplored) power of a woman laying claim to a period of celibacy for spiritual and personal reasons. Febos is both unflinching and compassionate as she inventories all that she has done for love, and what she will never do again. A deeply important book, and I saw myself and many women whom I love and admire on every page.”
—Elizabeth Gilbert author of Eat Pray Love
“Reading The Dry Season is like having a nourishing conversation with a smart, wry, and ever-probing friend—a conversation so full of wisdom and pleasure that you don’t want it to end. But the book is more than that. Under its nominal topic and entertaining inventory lies a commitment to the lifelong project of “how to get free”—which, as Febos makes clear, is distinct from the more familiar one of “whose fault it was.” The example of Febos’s commitment throughout these pages is inspiring and rare; we’re lucky and better off for it.”
—Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts
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“Only Melissa Febos could write a memoir of her sexual abstinence and make it like a game of Clue. How to catch a thief when the thief is yourself? And the thief of yourself, too? A profound, distilled, untying of a complex knot—Febos riddles out the ways we might subjugate ourselves even with the ways we imagine we are liberated.”
—Alexander Chee, author of How To Write an Autobiographical Novel
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“Only Melissa Febos could convince us of the ecstasy of abstinence. She never fails in her candor and precision.”
—Katherine May, author of Wintering
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“In The Dry Season, Melissa Febos draws us into the depths of obsession and desire, delivering an unflinching yet generous reflection on the formative moments that shape our relationships. This is no ordinary excavation; it’s a director’s cut of our darkest impulses, a mirror held up to our psyche, revealing the universal threads of longing and weakness that bind us together. . . . This is a dictionary of vulnerability. . . . With precision and grace, Febos illuminates how our failures, our heartbreaks, and our obsessions hold the potential for transformation. She invites us to uncover the meaning behind it all—how sex, desire, and history converge to shape who we are and who we might yet become. The Dry Season is a testament to the power of self-awareness, a way forward for those brave enough to look back.”
—Samra Habib, author of We Have Always Been Here
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“Deftly illuminates how and why one’s sense of self is subject to change, mutilate, or surrender when in relation to another and asks what happens when that stops. The result is profound—Febos embraces the ability to be alone and in love with oneself. The Dry Season is essential reading.”
—A.M. Homes, author of The Unfolding