The Dry Season

‘Brilliant and powerful’ ELIZABETH GILBERT
‘So full of wisdom and pleasure that you don’t want it to end’ MAGGIE NELSON

In the wake of a disastrous two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break – for three months she would abstain from dating, relationships and sex. Her friends were amused. Did she really think three months was a long time? But to Melissa, it was. Ever since her teens, she had been in one relationship or another. It was time to focus on herself and examine the lifelong patterns that had got her to this point. When those three months ended, she decided to extend her celibate period, fearing that she had not yet gained the clarity she was searching for. She knew she was taking on a challenge but had no idea that this year would become the most fulfilling and sensual of her life.

No longer defined by her romantic pursuits, Melissa learned to relish the delights of solitude, the thrill of living on her own terms, the pleasures unmediated by lovers and the freedom to pursue her ideals without distraction or guilt. She 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 work, creativity – and most of all her relationship to herself.

The Dry Season is a memoir of Melissa’s year of celibacy, and a profound exploration of independence, sexuality and deep self-knowledge.

Author Biography

Melissa Febos is the national bestselling author of four previous books: Whip Smart, Abandon Me, Girlhood – winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism – and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. She has been awarded prizes and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, LAMBDA Literary, the National Endowment for the Arts, the British Library, the Black Mountain Institute, the Bogliasco Foundation, MacDowell, the American Library in Paris and others. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Best American Essays, Vogue, Sewanee Review, New York Review of Books and elsewhere. Febos is a full professor at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly.

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