On the Shelf

The Dry Season

By Melissa FebosKnopf: 288 pages, $29If you purchase books linked on our website, The Instances might earn a fee from Bookshop.org, whose charges assist unbiased bookstores.

After leaping from one relationship to the following, Melissa Febos discovered herself in mattress with a lady she scarcely knew. “Though I stubbornly tried to prove otherwise, for me, sex without chemistry or love was a horror,” Febos writes in her new ebook, “The Dry Season.” “A few weeks later, I decided to spend three months celibate.”

On an unseasonably heat and sunny day in Seattle, I met Febos to speak concerning the stunning pleasure when these three months changed into a full yr of celibacy. “I had been thinking of this time as a dry season, but it had been the most fertile of my life since childhood,” Febos writes. “I had run dry when I spent that vitality in worship of lovers. In celibacy, I felt more vital, fecund, wet, than I had in years.”

Whereas giving up bodily intimacy would possibly sound like the alternative of titillating, these acquainted with the calls for of monogamy and motherhood might acknowledge the erotic potential of solitude. “A friend of mine took a trip without her toddler and said that the time she spent waiting in line to board was borderline erotic because it was a quiet time and space that she hadn’t had in years,” Febos mentioned.

At 44, Febos has already established herself as a prolific, critically acclaimed and bestselling author of memoirs and inventive nonfiction. “The Dry Season” is her fifth ebook. Her first, “Whip Smart,” chronicles her time as an expert dominatrix. “Abandon Me” tells of shedding herself in a poisonous relationship, combating dependancy and discovering her organic father, and “Girlhood” is a group of essays about being in a physique that not belongs to her. Her most up-to-date, “Body Work,” is a craft ebook on embodied writing.

The bodily physique is clearly central to her writing — the way it impacts our work, our private relationships and, most significantly, our relationship with ourselves. In a 2022 essay for the New York Instances Journal, Febos described her resolution to bear a breast discount as a method to reclaim herself. In a society the place bodily autonomy is underneath energetic and devastating assault, Febos’ work isn’t solely provocative, it’s completely vital.

Within the flesh, it’s troublesome to think about Febos as something however completely in management. She is heat, compassionate and simple to snigger. She’s happy with the work she’s accomplished in restoration from dependancy. A lot of “The Dry Season” takes inspiration from applications comparable to Alcoholics Nameless, the place the will for a substance is in actuality a want to be nearer to God.

It’s unsurprising then that Febos found that nuns had been a number of the first ladies to seek out freedom in celibacy. She was notably concerned with one medieval sect referred to as the Beguines, who “took no vows, did not give up their property, and could leave the order anytime. They traveled, preached, and lived more independently than most women in the western world.” But it surely wasn’t essentially that they rejected intercourse, as Febos writes, however relatively a life targeted on males. “The Beguines did not just quit sex, and it is likely many did not give up sex at all. They quit lives that held men at the center.”

When Febos informed a good friend that she was going to take a break from intercourse, she rolled her eyes. It’s assumed that intercourse and love addicts are often straight individuals, that it’s heterosexual males who’re intercourse addicts and heterosexual ladies who’re love addicts. “There was part of me that hoped I might be SLA [sex and love addict], because it could’ve been an easy answer,” Febos mentioned.

Febos works to dismantle heteronormative stereotypes about love and intercourse on this ebook, quoting author Sara Ahmed: “When you leave heterosexuality, you still live in a heterosexual world.” Later within the ebook, she discusses the uniquely queer and efficient partnership of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. “I didn’t want to simply relocate within compulsory heterosexual gender roles,” she writes. “I wanted to divest from them.”

Febos mentioned playfully, “I thank God every day that I am not straight. But we’re still socialized to behave a certain way. We all live under patriarchy. But I never had fantasies of marriage or of being a wife,” Febos mentioned. “My dream was always to be a writer, an artist.”

In “The Dry Season,” Febos processes a number of the expertise of being celibate by means of her friendship with a youthful queer lady named Ray. Although there may be sexual rigidity between them, the reconfiguring of want helped Febos understand that some impulses aren’t price performing on. Febos has taught artistic writing within the Grasp of Fantastic Arts program on the College of Iowa for the previous 5 years and considers herself fortunate that she’s by no means felt drawn to her college students. “Teaching helps me to be a better writer,” she mentioned. “But it is partly about seduction, about being able to hold someone’s attention, to get them to feel something you feel passionately about or to help them see something they haven’t recognized before.”

For Febos, the choice to take a step away from sexual intimacy is just like the expertise of understanding a textual content. “There is a difference between how you react to a text and how you analyze a text,” she writes. “You can be attracted or repelled by the content and still think critically about the response, about your own relationship to the text. As in love among humans, we cannot appreciate a text until we really see it, and in order to see it we have to get out of the way.” In different phrases, to actually perceive your want, it’s a must to spend a while aside from it.

“The Dry Season” isn’t any marriage plot. Though Febos’ spouse, poet Donika Kelly, who Febos met after her interval of celibacy concluded, seems briefly on the finish of the ebook, Febos resisted having her there in any respect. “That was truly not the point,” she mentioned laughing, “to say, ‘Look, it all turned out great in the end!’ ” I informed Febos that many ladies had confided in me (in response to studying Miranda July’s novel “All Fours”) that they felt obligated to take part in intercourse of their marriages with males. “That’s really the point of this book,” she responded. “Why are you having sex if you don’t want to be having sex? This radical honesty not only benefits you but it also benefits your partner. To me, that’s love: enthusiastic consent.”

Febos has reached the purpose in her profession the place she is in management. She informed her agent that she would write a short proposal for this ebook and nothing extra, and it offered rapidly. It is a freedom many writers won’t ever obtain. Maybe it’s on account of the truth that Febos works not solely on her craft however on herself. “My subject is myself, so this kind of work, in my relationships and with myself, is germane to my writing,” she mentioned. Her inside work has been a sensible funding, main Febos to really feel extra freedom in her authorial imaginative and prescient, even perhaps shifting towards fiction. “Writing is a process of integration for me,” she mentioned. “I am so comforted by all of life’s surprises.”