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Washington Post

A writer gave up sex for a year and discovered pleasure

I expected this review to write itself in a headlong rush, the way I read 'The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex.' But like abstinence, the lessons of Melissa Febos's latest book require a bit of forbearance to bear fruit. A serial dater since she was 15 years old, Febos recounts her decision to shake loose from the lovers whose desires had dominated her thoughts and directed her habits. How might it change us to live as we're 'meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity,' as Annie Dillard wrote? Aiming to find out, Febos embarked on a grand experiment: not to seduce, or be seduced, but instead remain replete by embracing masturbation as a form of self-nourishment. Researching medieval nunneries as well as the beguines, lay sisterhoods that chose God and chastity over marriage and children, Febos discovered tremendous sensuality and 'a harbor for ambition.' She became fixated on the German abbess Hildegard von Bingen, a composer and philosopher believed to have written the first known description of a woman's orgasm: 'that vehement heat descending from her brain.' Having chased not just the pleasure but also the power of such fervor since she was pubescent, Febos made an inventory of past lovers to identify the recurrent habits that led to her discontent. She discovered that she was the architect of her own unhappiness and that of many exes. Bad at breaking up with people, Febos preferred to linger 'for months and months after I knew I wanted to leave,' an outcome she created by straying: 'I never stayed past the first kiss—I don't have the constitution for a protracted affair—but also rarely had the guts or gumption to end my relationships without the imperative of infidelity.' Febos's great power as a writer is pairing structural rigor with emotional disclosure. An award-winning memoirist and Guggenheim fellow whose prior books include 'Girlhood,' 'Body Work' and 'Abandon Me,' she has a way of turning her gaze both inward and outward. In 'The Dry Season,' Febos plumbs the restless depths of her own seeking by entwining her compulsive self-discovery with curiosity about a wide range of writers. From nuns to poets to philosophers, her references form a canon, which she has called a squad: Audre Lorde, Virginia Woolf, Sappho, Octavia E. Butler, Sara Ahmed, the Combahee River Collective, Hadewijch, Adrienne Rich, Simone Weil, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, May Sarton, and the list goes on. 'My attempt to replace dependence with independence and interdependence, to share my questions and answers with the women who came before and after me, was the radical basis of all feminisms,' Febos writes. 'It was the basis of all freedoms. It was my inheritance.' While Febos had broken free of the addictions that characterized the dominatrix life she described in her debut memoir, 'Whip Smart,' her therapist still referred to her as a 'user.' Lovers were her fix. With the time she has spent cataloguing her romantic interests, she worries she 'could have become a real activist instead of someone who only wrote about the things she'd like to change.' However, prying apart the fractals of internalized oppression that keep us in endlessly repeating loops can be a service to society. Febos had age-old patterns to break even before she entered what she calls 'the Maelstrom,' a destructive relationship she exhumed and dissected for 'Abandon Me.' She realized she had desiccated her spirit in service of ephemeral satiation; she had wanted to seduce people, but not just sexually. 'What I wanted from them,' she writes, 'was ultimately more subtle than that: to secure their focus, to make them like me.' Though not as overtly religious as the nuns she venerates, Febos deploys earnest confessions to reach for what is holy: 'Aversion to embarrassment makes it incredibly hard to be vulnerable, and avoidance of vulnerability robs us of true connection with other people, the deep comforts of being known and receiving love.' Tired of squandering her energy on the male gaze, Febos evolved by cultivating desire for and from a multitude of genders before engaging sensual surety from within. 'If my ceaseless entanglements were a result of the ways that I related to other people, then the goal of my celibacy was to relate to myself,' she writes. By reclaiming her focus, she replenished her erotic sense of selfhood, what Lorde called 'an assertion of the lifeforce of women.' The result? In celibacy, Febos was awash with arousal. Backing away from 'empty consent' with Lorde as her guide star, Febos writes, 'I wanted to move into sunlight against another body only when it could embody the same erotic truth that writing did, that my aloneness had.' By centering herself, Febos divined a path toward the woman who would become her wife, the acclaimed poet Donika Kelly, to whom 'The Dry Season' is dedicated. Across five books, Febos has venerated literary ancestors while scrutinizing her own choices. Some might deride attention to personal experience and sexual pleasure while our democracy disintegrates around us, but sex and love are energies that turn us toward each other in an era whose ravages are designed to create lasting isolation. As Adrienne Maree Brown wrote in 'Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good,' 'Liberated relationships are one of the ways we actually create abundant justice, the understanding that there is enough attention, care, resource, and connection for all of us to access belonging, to be in our dignity, and to be safe in community.' Kristen Millares Young is the author of the award-winning novel 'Subduction' and 'Desire Lines — Essays,' forthcoming from Red Hen Press on Oct. 6. A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex By Melissa Febos Knopf. 288 pp. $29