Latest news with #TheDrySeason
Daily Mirror
16-06-2025
- General
- Daily Mirror
I cried every day before giving up sex and the result was life-changing'
After a string of failed relationships, Melissa Febos took a vow of abstinence to understand why she jumped from one romance to the next, with unexpected results… When serial monogamist Melissa Febos was pushed to breaking point by a toxic relationship, she took drastic action - she pledged to boycott sex and all romantic entanglements for 90 days. Yet once that time passed, Melissa, an English professor at the University of Iowa in the US, felt so energised and refreshed by stepping back from the merry-go-round of romance that she decided to keep on going. In the end, she enjoyed an entire year of abstinence, an experience that transformed her life and is the subject of her new book, The Dry Season. 'At the end of the three months, it was clear to me that I had barely begun,' she says. 'My whole relationship to love and sex needed an overhaul if I wanted to change the pattern I was mired in. 'From adolescence until my early 30s, I was in non-stop relationships and very preoccupied with infatuation and flirtation and seduction. I definitely enjoyed myself. I fell in love many times and it was thrilling and quite wonderful.' But as soon as each relationship began to feel secure, Melissa's interest would start to wane. 'I never had a relationship that lasted longer than three years and most of them were shorter. I was always falling in love and breaking up. Those are exhausting pastimes.' Friends and family suggested she might benefit from spending some time on her own. As a former heroin addict, Melissa sometimes feared she had swapped one addiction for another – love addiction. But then someone new would catch her eye and the cycle would begin again. Then she fell into a 'super addictive, toxic, destructive relationship… I abandoned everything else I cared about, I lost touch with friends, I cried every day. It was obsessive and unhealthy. I neglected my writing and my health and my family, and I had friends who broke up with me because I was quite out of my mind'. The relationship ended after two tumultuous years but it served as a wake-up call. 'It was time for me to take a hiatus and reflect on what I've been doing all this time… I couldn't go through that again. It was so painful.' During her 2016 experiment, she appreciated having far more free time and mental space. 'When people consider abstinence or celibacy, they think of it as a kind of deprivation,' she says. 'I didn't feel deprived of anything. I mean, it was really fun when I got to have sex with another person again. But I never felt deprived. 'From the very beginning, I felt like I had more time and more energy. Almost all of my other relationships started to really flourish. My life just felt bigger.' She also noticed how romance-obsessed Western culture is. 'One of the first things I saw during my celibacy was how much everyone talked about love and sex and dating constantly. Watching TV shows, I thought, 'I can't believe how immature our fantasy of love is'. It's all about that very early period where we're feverishly obsessed with someone we don't even know yet. That is what we're calling love. It felt like I really woke up from a kind of collective derangement.' During her 'dry season', Melissa did have the occasional frisson with a stranger but she was never seriously tempted to start a new relationship because she was so determined to break her old habits. She also began to understand why she kept jumping from one relationship to the next and had the realisation that that she was a people-pleaser. 'When I'm around other people, I feel the focus needs to be on them and I need to perform in a certain way. And that was what I needed a break from,' she says. 'It's the instinctive urge to meet another person's wants, desires, expectations, whether it's what I want to do or not, feeling almost as if I don't have a choice – I think that's completely learned, it goes back centuries.' She attributes it to the days when a woman's value was entirely based on her marriageability. 'Your life literally depended upon your appeal to men. There's still a lot of messaging that the power to sexually attract is your greatest power. It had really got into my head that I should cultivate it, that that's where I should be getting my self esteem from. It really did a number on me. 'So I lost myself again and again. It was not an authentic life. That life was not worth living.' Melissa reached a point where she couldn't imagine ever being in another relationship. 'I did not want to compromise what I'd found in being alone,' she says. Then, right at the end of her year of abstinence, she met the poet Donika Kelly. The attraction was immediate. 'But what was different was that as soon as I felt that, I thought, 'OK, I need to stay inside myself, I need to hold on to myself'.' They agreed to take it slowly and, for 18 months, they had a long-distance relationship. Melissa also took a gamble on complete honesty, telling Donika, ''I've just had this transformative experience… My romantic relationship will not always be the most important thing in my life'. The honesty was unlike the beginning of any relationship I'd ever had before. And she said, 'Yes, that sounds good to me'. The gamble paid off. 'I am happily married now, I've been married for four years and with my wife for going on nine,' says Melissa. 'It is very clear to me that spending that year alone with myself, and understanding how complete I was without another person, is the very thing that made it possible for me to sustain a long-term relationship. 'But my marriage wouldn't last if I put my partner first all of the time. We have to put ourselves first a lot of the time so that when we show up for each other, we can do so in the spirit of true generosity and love. But it's scary because it goes against the grain of what society tells us.' She thinks all of us can benefit from a romantic rethink, to make sure we're not putting our partners' needs ahead of our own. 'Everyone could really do with a redefinition of what connection and love are. I think this is where people get trapped in a cycle of 'I can't find the right person'. Because there's a misunderstanding about the nature of a long-term relationship, which takes a lot of energy and a lot of work. It's not just something you feed off. Being alone is much easier. 'We've all seen all the movies where finding the person is the end of the story. But anyone who's been married a long time knows it's the beginning.' The Dry Season: Finding Pleasure In A Year Without Sex by Melissa Febos (Canongate), £16.99, is out now
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Benefits of Refusing
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. In the U.K., when people stop smoking, they say they 'gave it up,' Melissa Febos notes in her new book, The Dry Season. In the U.S., by contrast, it's more common to hear that they 'quit.' She observes that giving something up has a different connotation; to do so is 'to hand it over to some other, better keeper. To free one's hands for other holdings.' The phrasing matters: Giving up feels gentler, and also perhaps more generative. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic's books section: Fast times and mean girls The real message behind Les Misérables How one animal divided Europe Seven books for people figuring out their next move The Dry Season is a memoir about the year Febos spent voluntarily celibate, and this week, she wrote for The Atlantic about six books that celebrate refusal and abstinence. The titles she chose opened her eyes to 'all the other kinds of reneging I've experienced, and how many of them led to unforeseen delights,' she writes. In her own book, Febos uses a striking metaphor to explain why she took a break from sex, dating, and even flirtation. Whenever she had a partner, she writes, 'it made sense to keep the channel of one's heart narrowed the width of a single person, to peer through the keyhole at a single room rather than turn to face the world.' Febos realized that she wanted, instead, to widen her aperture, and found that removing something from her life opened her up to all the other things that had escaped her notice. In essence, her book argues, saying no to one thing allows you to say yes to something else. At a talk with the essayist and fellow memoirist Leslie Jamison earlier this week in New York, Febos said that her book is really about finding God, but she told the world that it was about sex because, she joked, it made for better marketing. Her description of discovering the sublime in daily things—such as the 'tang of fresh raspberries and the crispness of clean bedsheets,' as she writes in her recommendation list—moved me. It reminded me that spirituality can be less restrictive and more dynamic than I usually imagine it to be; that it can be found in smaller phenomena and stiller moments. My colleague Faith Hill, in her review of The Dry Season, came to much the same conclusion about the benefits of marshaling one's attention: 'Better to keep drawing it back, again and again, to the world around you: to the pinch in your shoe, to the buds in the trees, to the people—all the many, many people—who are right there beside you.' Febos's book made me wonder what narrow portals I'm looking through in my life, and what I might see if I turn away from them. What to Read When You're Ready to Say No By Melissa Febos Purposeful refusal, far from depriving us, can make way for unexpected bounty. Read the full article. , by Bae Suah The page-turning plot twists and thrills of a detective novel are often a very effective bulwark against boredom. The Korean writer Bae's novel offers those genre pleasures and more: It is, as Bae's longtime translator Deborah Smith explains in her note, a detective novel by way of a 'poetic fever dream.' Set over the course of one very hot summer night in Seoul, the book follows a woman named Ayami as she attempts to find a missing friend. As she searches, she bumps into Wolfi, a detective novelist visiting from Germany, and enlists him in her quest. Events take on a surreal quality, heightened by both an intense heat wave and the possibility that Ayami and Wolfi may have stumbled into another dimension. Summer's release from our usual timetables can quickly lead to seasonal doldrums. Untold Night and Day, set during the stretched hours of a sweaty, unceasing evening, shimmers at its edges, like midnight in July. — Rhian Sasseen From our list: Five books that will redirect your attention 📚 UnWorld, by Jayson Greene 📚 The Möbius Book, by Catherine Lacey 📚 The Sisters, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri What Trump Missed at the Kennedy Center By Megan Garber Little wonder that 'Do You Hear the People Sing?' [from Les Misérables] has become a protest song the world over, its words invoked as pleas for freedom. Crowds in Hong Kong, fighting for democracy, have sung it. So have crowds in the United States, fighting for the rights of unions. The story's tensions are the core tensions of politics too: the rights of the individual, colliding with the needs of the collective; the possibilities, and tragedies, that can come when human dignity is systematized. Les Mis, as a story, is pointedly specific—one country, one rebellion, one meaning of freedom. But Les Mis, as a broader phenomenon, is elastic. It is not one story but many, the product of endless interpretation and reiteration. With the novel, Hugo turned acts of history into a work of fiction. The musical turned the fiction into a show. And American politics, now, have turned the show into a piece of fan fic. Read the full article. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Explore all of our newsletters. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Benefits of Refusing
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. In the U.K., when people stop smoking, they say they 'gave it up,' Melissa Febos notes in her new book, The Dry Season. In the U.S., by contrast, it's more common to hear that they 'quit.' She observes that giving something up has a different connotation; to do so is 'to hand it over to some other, better keeper. To free one's hands for other holdings.' The phrasing matters: Giving up feels gentler, and also perhaps more generative. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic 's books section: The Dry Season is a memoir about the year Febos spent voluntarily celibate, and this week, she wrote for The Atlantic about six books that celebrate refusal and abstinence. The titles she chose opened her eyes to 'all the other kinds of reneging I've experienced, and how many of them led to unforeseen delights,' she writes. In her own book, Febos uses a striking metaphor to explain why she took a break from sex, dating, and even flirtation. Whenever she had a partner, she writes, 'it made sense to keep the channel of one's heart narrowed the width of a single person, to peer through the keyhole at a single room rather than turn to face the world.' Febos realized that she wanted, instead, to widen her aperture, and found that removing something from her life opened her up to all the other things that had escaped her notice. In essence, her book argues, saying no to one thing allows you to say yes to something else. At a talk with the essayist and fellow memoirist Leslie Jamison earlier this week in New York, Febos said that her book is really about finding God, but she told the world that it was about sex because, she joked, it made for better marketing. Her description of discovering the sublime in daily things—such as the 'tang of fresh raspberries and the crispness of clean bedsheets,' as she writes in her recommendation list—moved me. It reminded me that spirituality can be less restrictive and more dynamic than I usually imagine it to be; that it can be found in smaller phenomena and stiller moments. My colleague Faith Hill, in her review of The Dry Season, came to much the same conclusion about the benefits of marshaling one's attention: 'Better to keep drawing it back, again and again, to the world around you: to the pinch in your shoe, to the buds in the trees, to the people—all the many, many people—who are right there beside you.' Febos's book made me wonder what narrow portals I'm looking through in my life, and what I might see if I turn away from them. By Melissa Febos Purposeful refusal, far from depriving us, can make way for unexpected bounty. What to Read Untold Night and Day, by Bae Suah The page-turning plot twists and thrills of a detective novel are often a very effective bulwark against boredom. The Korean writer Bae's novel offers those genre pleasures and more: It is, as Bae's longtime translator Deborah Smith explains in her note, a detective novel by way of a 'poetic fever dream.' Set over the course of one very hot summer night in Seoul, the book follows a woman named Ayami as she attempts to find a missing friend. As she searches, she bumps into Wolfi, a detective novelist visiting from Germany, and enlists him in her quest. Events take on a surreal quality, heightened by both an intense heat wave and the possibility that Ayami and Wolfi may have stumbled into another dimension. Summer's release from our usual timetables can quickly lead to seasonal doldrums. Untold Night and Day, set during the stretched hours of a sweaty, unceasing evening, shimmers at its edges, like midnight in July. — Rhian Sasseen Out Next Week 📚 UnWorld, by Jayson Greene 📚 The Möbius Book, by Catherine Lacey 📚 The Sisters, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri Your Weekend Read What Trump Missed at the Kennedy Center By Megan Garber Little wonder that 'Do You Hear the People Sing?' [from Les Misérables ] has become a protest song the world over, its words invoked as pleas for freedom. Crowds in Hong Kong, fighting for democracy, have sung it. So have crowds in the United States, fighting for the rights of unions. The story's tensions are the core tensions of politics too: the rights of the individual, colliding with the needs of the collective; the possibilities, and tragedies, that can come when human dignity is systematized. Les Mis, as a story, is pointedly specific—one country, one rebellion, one meaning of freedom. But Les Mis, as a broader phenomenon, is elastic. It is not one story but many, the product of endless interpretation and reiteration. With the novel, Hugo turned acts of history into a work of fiction. The musical turned the fiction into a show. And American politics, now, have turned the show into a piece of fan fic.
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Lifestyle
- Yahoo
Six Books That Prove Abstinence Can Be Abundance
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. To the uninitiated, the words abstinence and divestment may connote a sense of deprivation or sacrifice. When applied to a person, they bring to mind someone who has given up, for example, salt, sugar, alcohol, smoking, or sex—and has thereby consigned themselves to a dry, joyless fate. Not so, in my experience. In my new book, The Dry Season, I recount how, in my mid-30s, after 20 years of nonstop committed relationships, I decided to spend some time being intentionally celibate. I knew I needed to take stock of and change my romantic patterns, and ended up going a year not only without sex, but without all the attendant activities, including dating and flirting. The great surprise of that period wasn't how it changed my outlook on love and sex, but how enjoyable it was. For 20 years I had been relentlessly falling in and out of love, and withdrawing from those obsessions meant devoting my recouped attention to other passions: friends, family, activism, art. I read more books and went dancing more often that year than during any other in my life. Even mundane experiences came into more vivid focus: I was taken by the tang of fresh raspberries and the crispness of clean bedsheets, along with the sweet freedom of solitude. I had always looked for the sublime in lovers, but in their absence I found it everywhere. Writing a book on the abundance of that year got me thinking about all the other kinds of reneging I've experienced, and how many of them led to unforeseen delights. As a young addict, I thought that my artistic practice relied on drugs and alcohol, only to find that my work bloomed in recovery. Similarly, when I gave up obsessive control of my eating habits, I began to truly relish food again. Rather than grimly depriving us, purposeful refusal can open us to all the bounty we have been forgoing. This realignment applies not only to attachments that rise to the level of addiction, but also to idle penchants or habits that we seek repetitively for comfort. The six books below describe other forms of abundance found, counterintuitively, through abstinence. , by Kazim Ali This lucid memoir originated from a journal that Ali kept while fasting during one Ramadan, and it retains the intimacy of that private beginning while evolving into a resonant meditation on hunger and worship. In the opening he writes, 'One feels, at the end of a day of fasting, like a tree branch or a bone bleached in the sun.' Readers will find sensual pleasure in his sumptuous writing about hunger, its passing, and what swells to fill that space; his tremendous poetic gifts capture that richness. 'I will miss the feeling of emptiness that foodlessness offers me,' he admits later. 'I will miss the weird focus that comes from removing consideration of this huge thing from my mental space.' In anticipation of swearing off something, we typically focus on what we give up or will lack. But the experience so often reveals the things we've been neglecting. As Ali depicts so beautifully, 'holiness is everywhere,' and sacrifice can sharpen our attunement to it. [Read: A Ramadan and Eid in isolation] , by Pema Chödrön Probably no other book on Earth has given me more comfort over the years than this one. Chödrön is a kind of patron saint to Buddhists in the United States, and for good reason. Her warm explanations of Buddhist principles make clear their application to everyday struggles. This book is her most direct explication of the First Noble Truth—that life is suffering—and it locates the freedom of living in that truth. She instructs readers to cultivate compassion and curiosity, and to stop running from fear. This final invocation, against choosing comfort over distress, is the most challenging kind of abstinence for many of us, myself certainly included. She asks us to feel the needle of fear without slipping away with a fantasy, a snack, a book, or a lover. I once read a definition of compulsion that described it as 'an action meant to relieve a mental obsession.' As an addict, much of my life has been governed by such actions. But as Chödrön explains, when we pause before the deed 'and don't act out, don't repress, don't blame it on anyone else, and also don't blame it on ourselves, then we meet with an open-ended question that has no conceptual answer. We also encounter our heart.' , by Hilma af Klint This book contains the first English translation of the writings of af Klint, a Swedish painter and mystic. Born in 1862, she was trained in painting at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, in Stockholm, where she was among the first generation of women admitted. She painted naturalistic portraits and detailed studies until, in her mid-40s, she dove dramatically into abstraction. A student of Goethe's color theory and a member of Rudolf Steiner's Theosophical Society, she eschewed traditional painting methods in order to pursue what she encountered through séances and mediumship: an invisible life force undergirding everything. Years before Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian created their nonrepresentative canvases, af Klint assembled a massive body of abstract work marked by esoteric spiritual codes, diagrams, and symbols. Before she died in 1944, she indicated that she did not want her paintings revealed to the public for at least two decades, claiming that the world was not ready for them—and, true to her prediction, her work found a rapturous audience when it was shown in the 21st century. Notes and Methods includes a glossary of her meanings along with reproductions of her sketches and paintings. It provides a guide to the thoughts behind the great artist's works. It is also, more implicitly, an ode to the freedom found in relinquishing the need for recognition in one's lifetime. [Read: The artist who captured the contradictions of femininity] , by Sophie Fontanel This memoir describes the period of time that its author, a glamorous French fashion-magazine editor, spent voluntarily celibate in her late 20s. At the start, she imagines a life turned 'soft and fluffy'; she claims, 'I was through with being had.' Fontanel goes on to elegantly describe the gratification of aloneness, and offers keen social observations about the mistaken assumptions of others, foremost among them the idea that a woman needs a partner to find happiness. 'I don't know if love makes us blind,' she ponders, 'but I do believe that solitude allows us to see inside people's minds'—that is, it hones a person's ability to accurately perceive others, and oneself. Set against a classically Parisian backdrop, this tour through Fontanel's head is pure pleasure, especially her moving reflections on how celibacy led to healing her own relationship with her body and sexual desire: 'Could it trust me, this body, after the rough treatment I'd put it through?' She finds that it can. , by Caroline Knapp Knapp's memoir of sobriety is just one entry in a robust genre, standing among books such as Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey, The Night of the Gun by David Carr, The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, Lit by Mary Karr, and The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll. But Drinking: A Love Story was pivotal for me; I borrowed it from a sober person when I first started trying to stop. Knapp's depiction of addiction as a doomed love affair struck home. 'For a long time,' she writes, 'when it's working, the drink feels like a path to a kind of self-enlightenment, something that turns us into the person we wish to be, or the person we think we really are.' Every book about abstinence is also, inevitably, a book about indulgence—and what lies at its bottom, eventually demanding that we go without. As Knapp puts it, 'In some ways the dynamic is this simple: alcohol makes everything better until it makes everything worse.' Her book details the glory and devastation that precedes the liberation of quitting, including the way that our excesses can subtly (or violently) affect our intimate relationships. Knapp's lushly written story illustrates the insidious way that romanticizing a dependency of any kind distorts its true impact on our lives. [Read: Writing and alcohol: a reckoning] , by Agnes Martin I had long loved Martin's famous, minimalist mid-century grid paintings, but for a long time I didn't know much about their creator. During my period of celibacy, this changed. Something of a mystic, just like af Klint, Martin found meaning and structure in artistic practice and spiritual rigor. Raised by Calvinists, she rejected formal religion but was influenced by many philosophies, particularly Taoism. Martin lived an ascetic and solitary life, and often denounced overly cerebral art. 'A lot of people will think that social understanding or something like that is going to lead us to the truth, but it isn't. It is understanding of yourself,' she said in a mid-1970s interview. Or, as she put it to a class of students at the Skowhegan School in 1987: 'The intellect has nothing to do with artwork.' Writings is full of notes, poems, micro-essays, lectures, and aphoristic passages that ring in my memory years after I first read them. Though Martin was diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychotic episodes plagued her, she never described her life as an unhappy one. She chose the path she wanted, one that structured and directed the insurmountable forces intrinsic in her and alchemized them into great art. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
09-06-2025
- General
- Atlantic
Six Books That Prove Abstinence Can Be Abundance
To the uninitiated, the words abstinence and divestment may connote a sense of deprivation or sacrifice. When applied to a person, they bring to mind someone who has given up, for example, salt, sugar, alcohol, smoking, or sex—and has thereby consigned themselves to a dry, joyless fate. Not so, in my experience. In my new book, The Dry Season, I recount how, in my mid-30s, after 20 years of nonstop committed relationships, I decided to spend some time being intentionally celibate. I knew I needed to take stock of and change my romantic patterns, and ended up going a year not only without sex, but without all the attendant activities, including dating and flirting. The great surprise of that period wasn't how it changed my outlook on love and sex, but how enjoyable it was. For 20 years I had been relentlessly falling in and out of love, and withdrawing from those obsessions meant devoting my recouped attention to other passions: friends, family, activism, art. I read more books and went dancing more often that year than during any other in my life. Even mundane experiences came into more vivid focus: I was taken by the tang of fresh raspberries and the crispness of clean bedsheets, along with the sweet freedom of solitude. I had always looked for the sublime in lovers, but in their absence I found it everywhere. Writing a book on the abundance of that year got me thinking about all the other kinds of reneging I've experienced, and how many of them led to unforeseen delights. As a young addict, I thought that my artistic practice relied on drugs and alcohol, only to find that my work bloomed in recovery. Similarly, when I gave up obsessive control of my eating habits, I began to truly relish food again. Rather than grimly depriving us, purposeful refusal can open us to all the bounty we have been forgoing. This realignment applies not only to attachments that rise to the level of addiction, but also to idle penchants or habits that we seek repetitively for comfort. The six books below describe other forms of abundance found, counterintuitively, through abstinence. Fasting for Ramadan, by Kazim Ali This lucid memoir originated from a journal that Ali kept while fasting during one Ramadan, and it retains the intimacy of that private beginning while evolving into a resonant meditation on hunger and worship. In the opening he writes, 'One feels, at the end of a day of fasting, like a tree branch or a bone bleached in the sun.' Readers will find sensual pleasure in his sumptuous writing about hunger, its passing, and what swells to fill that space; his tremendous poetic gifts capture that richness. 'I will miss the feeling of emptiness that foodlessness offers me,' he admits later. 'I will miss the weird focus that comes from removing consideration of this huge thing from my mental space.' In anticipation of swearing off something, we typically focus on what we give up or will lack. But the experience so often reveals the things we've been neglecting. As Ali depicts so beautifully, 'holiness is everywhere,' and sacrifice can sharpen our attunement to it. , by Pema Chödrön Probably no other book on Earth has given me more comfort over the years than this one. Chödrön is a kind of patron saint to Buddhists in the United States, and for good reason. Her warm explanations of Buddhist principles make clear their application to everyday struggles. This book is her most direct explication of the First Noble Truth—that life is suffering—and it locates the freedom of living in that truth. She instructs readers to cultivate compassion and curiosity, and to stop running from fear. This final invocation, against choosing comfort over distress, is the most challenging kind of abstinence for many of us, myself certainly included. She asks us to feel the needle of fear without slipping away with a fantasy, a snack, a book, or a lover. I once read a definition of compulsion that described it as 'an action meant to relieve a mental obsession.' As an addict, much of my life has been governed by such actions. But as Chödrön explains, when we pause before the deed 'and don't act out, don't repress, don't blame it on anyone else, and also don't blame it on ourselves, then we meet with an open-ended question that has no conceptual answer. We also encounter our heart.' Notes and Methods, by Hilma af Klint This book contains the first English translation of the writings of af Klint, a Swedish painter and mystic. Born in 1862, she was trained in painting at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, in Stockholm, where she was among the first generation of women admitted. She painted naturalistic portraits and detailed studies until, in her mid-40s, she dove dramatically into abstraction. A student of Goethe's color theory and a member of Rudolf Steiner's Theosophical Society, she eschewed traditional painting methods in order to pursue what she encountered through séances and mediumship: an invisible life force undergirding everything. Years before Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian created their nonrepresentative canvases, af Klint assembled a massive body of abstract work marked by esoteric spiritual codes, diagrams, and symbols. Before she died in 1944, she indicated that she did not want her paintings revealed to the public for at least two decades, claiming that the world was not ready for them—and, true to her prediction, her work found a rapturous audience when it was shown in the 21st century. Notes and Methods includes a glossary of her meanings along with reproductions of her sketches and paintings. It provides a guide to the thoughts behind the great artist's works. It is also, more implicitly, an ode to the freedom found in relinquishing the need for recognition in one's lifetime. The Art of Sleeping Alone, by Sophie Fontanel This memoir describes the period of time that its author, a glamorous French fashion-magazine editor, spent voluntarily celibate in her late 20s. At the start, she imagines a life turned 'soft and fluffy'; she claims, 'I was through with being had.' Fontanel goes on to elegantly describe the gratification of aloneness, and offers keen social observations about the mistaken assumptions of others, foremost among them the idea that a woman needs a partner to find happiness. 'I don't know if love makes us blind,' she ponders, 'but I do believe that solitude allows us to see inside people's minds'—that is, it hones a person's ability to accurately perceive others, and oneself. Set against a classically Parisian backdrop, this tour through Fontanel's head is pure pleasure, especially her moving reflections on how celibacy led to healing her own relationship with her body and sexual desire: 'Could it trust me, this body, after the rough treatment I'd put it through?' She finds that it can. Drinking: A Love Story, by Caroline Knapp Knapp's memoir of sobriety is just one entry in a robust genre, standing among books such as Confessions of an English Opium -Eater by Thomas De Quincey, The Night of the Gun by David Carr, The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, Lit by Mary Karr, and The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll. But Drinking: A Love Story was pivotal for me; I borrowed it from a sober person when I first started trying to stop. Knapp's depiction of addiction as a doomed love affair struck home. 'For a long time,' she writes, 'when it's working, the drink feels like a path to a kind of self-enlightenment, something that turns us into the person we wish to be, or the person we think we really are.' Every book about abstinence is also, inevitably, a book about indulgence—and what lies at its bottom, eventually demanding that we go without. As Knapp puts it, 'In some ways the dynamic is this simple: alcohol makes everything better until it makes everything worse.' Her book details the glory and devastation that precedes the liberation of quitting, including the way that our excesses can subtly (or violently) affect our intimate relationships. Knapp's lushly written story illustrates the insidious way that romanticizing a dependency of any kind distorts its true impact on our lives. Writings, by Agnes Martin I had long loved Martin's famous, minimalist mid-century grid paintings, but for a long time I didn't know much about their creator. During my period of celibacy, this changed. Something of a mystic, just like af Klint, Martin found meaning and structure in artistic practice and spiritual rigor. Raised by Calvinists, she rejected formal religion but was influenced by many philosophies, particularly Taoism. Martin lived an ascetic and solitary life, and often denounced overly cerebral art. 'A lot of people will think that social understanding or something like that is going to lead us to the truth, but it isn't. It is understanding of yourself,' she said in a mid-1970s interview. Or, as she put it to a class of students at the Skowhegan School in 1987: 'The intellect has nothing to do with artwork.' Writings is full of notes, poems, micro-essays, lectures, and aphoristic passages that ring in my memory years after I first read them. Though Martin was diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychotic episodes plagued her, she never described her life as an unhappy one. She chose the path she wanted, one that structured and directed the insurmountable forces intrinsic in her and alchemized them into great art.
