The Dry Season

A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

Author Melissa Febos

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The award-winning author of Girlhood returns with a revelatory chronicle of her year of celibacy and its transformative impact on her relationships—to others, and to herself.

In the wake of a catastrophic two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break—for three months she would abstain from dating and casual sex. Ever since her teens, she'd been in one entanglement after another. As she puts it, she could trace a “daisy chain of romances” from her adolescence to her mid-thirties. And no matter where her partners identified on the gender spectrum, she always instinctively molded herself to appeal to them.

Over those first few months, she gleaned insights into her past and awoke to the joys of being single. She decided to…

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June 3, 2025

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MELISSA FEBOS is the nationally bestselling author of four books, including Girlhood—which won 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 Guggenheim Foundation, LAMBDA Literary, the National Endowment for the Arts, the British Library, the Black Mountain Institute, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Best American Essays, Vogue, The 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.