The Dry Season
Finding Pleasure in a Year Without Sex
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The Dry Season
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Narrated by:
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By:
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Melissa Febos
About this listen
'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.
©2025 Melissa Febos (P)2025 Canongate BooksCritic reviews
'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!)
'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)