The Dry Season

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. 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
The Dry Season is a 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 [ . . . ]. Febos is both unflinching and compassionate. A deeply important book, I saw myself and many women whom I love and admire on every page -- ELIZABETH GILBERT, author of EAT, PRAY, LOVE
Only Melissa Febos could convince us of the ecstasy of abstinence. She never fails in her candour and precision -- KATHERINE MAY, author of WINTERING
Who knew that a memoir of celibacy could be so stirring? A thoughtful, exacting study of the loss of self - both transcendent and self-abnegatory - that comes with desire. Melissa Febos teaches us that strength comes from vulnerability, and how a keen mind feels but also dissects -- CAL FLYN, author of ISLANDS OF ABANDONMENT
Panoramic yet whisper-close, so funny, exquisitely alive - radiant with ideas new and ancient like stars in a clear night sky -- JEREMY ATHERTON LIN, author of DEEP HOUSE
An astonishingly rich and affirming analysis, through the subject of celibacy, of what it means to love and be loved - what real intimacy requires, what it urges and what it generates. The Dry Season is the best kind of writing: curious, erudite, funny and deeply humane. I'm so grateful to be living in a world that has Melissa Febos's writing in it -- SOPHIE GILBERT, author of GIRL ON GIRL
Melissa Febos is a writer of singular wisdom and compassion, and The Dry Season is an utterly consuming and deeply generous book -- 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 [ . . . ]. It's the best book yet by one of contemporary non-fiction's lodestars -- KAVEH AKBAR, author of MARTYR!
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
Only Melissa Febos could write a memoir of her sexual abstinence and make it like a game of Cluedo. 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