In “The Uses of the Erotic,” Audre Lorde writes “Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.” The Dry Season is born of this scrutiny, a project empowered by the erotic and all its infinite wisdom.

Picking up chronologically in time after her first two books, the memoir Whip Smart and memoir-essay collection Abandon Me, The Dry Season charts Febos’ year of celibacy as she takes stock of her past. Celibacy is not an act of deprivation but a beginning, an opportunity to experience the body and its knowing in a new way. Febos contemplates past relationships, celebrates enduring friendships, and finds joy in things as massive as the Sappho painting on the cover and as modest as a cold pickle. 

Bringing us into what she calls a “course of study,” Febos weaves a rich body of research into her personal narrative. But the research breathes with the intimate story. It feels false to separate the two. As Febos puts it, she was studying “[t]o build a lineage beyond those who shared my weaknesses.” Febos transcends time and space pulling twelfth-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen, the medieval beguines, Virginia Woolf, and Octavia Butler (to name a few) into a feminism defined by “a prioritization of justice, the wisdom of lived experience, and a critical examination of social roles that deems any life practice ‘feminist.’” The fifth book in Febos’ utterly transcendental body of work, The Dry Season shows us we are always arriving at a new beginning.  

As Febos so fully immerses the reader in a world, it felt surreal to finally hear the voice that had been in my head. We chatted about what celibacy can teach us about divesting from patriarchy, creating personal and social change, and the pleasure of this work. We also chatted about this SNL sketch but, in SNL tradition, it had to be cut for time. 

Nina Sharma: When I began reading your book, Quincy [my husband], would ask, “How’s The Dry Season going?” And I’d say, “it’s actually kind of wet.” Then he’d keep asking me and I’d say “still wet,” and then I started calling it “The Wet Book.” I was joking at first but I realized it’s not a joke. You write about the quality of the air and it has a sensuality to it. At one point you say, a celibate life is a “renouncement of sexuality not sensuality.” I was wondering if you could talk about that more.

Melissa Febos: I got to a real bottom in my love and sex life and it seemed like sex was the thing on the timeline that was connecting everything. Very quickly, I realized sex wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I had located so much sensuality and eroticism and just so much of my energy in the practices that surround sex and seduction and attachment. It was yet another way of putting myself in a box. Instead of thinking: What is sensuality? How do I experience it? I had sort of located it in individual people, which is so much smaller than the sensual world. By hyper focusing on individual people, I was actually imposing a tragic limitation on my experience of the sensual world. It is the great lie of dependency and of all compulsion and addiction. The lie being that we need one particular finite source of something that is actually much more spiritual and universal and inherent to all life. 

NS: It’s so interesting because getting to that infinite space seemed like a game of inches. There is that pivotal scene where you describe this budding new way of being as having the “thinnest advantage” over the old way. The whole book seems to cherish that. What was it like to write from there?

MF: It seems so much easier and sexier to have a big revelation but a big revelation contains no instructions for actual change. Writing a manifesto does not a society change, right? It’s what you do with a revelation or clarity or an ideology or your will—the very small, humble ways you apply it. A lot of my work is about raising my own consciousness. This book, in some ways, is about raising my consciousness, but it’s also about the work that follows that, which is how to make those micro behavioral changes that accumulate into habits that change who you are in the world and what your impact is in the world. It’s not a grand statement or a resolution. It’s just trying to do one small thing differently. 

In my experience, I only ever have a very thin advantage over the old way of doing things. Especially because I’m a person of such strong instincts and habits and compulsions. The momentum, the inertia of what I have done in the past is so powerful. I can only ever sort of edge over it, and that has to be the big win because I’m just not capable of anything else. It takes reading a lot of feminist thought, having a community, having a fucking fleet of therapists, sponsors, and like a baker’s dozen of 12-step program memberships. And with all of that, I can just edge out the old behavior to try to get a foothold and purchase on a new way of being. 

It’s a very sort of humble, rigorous, relentless practice, but it is miraculous in the way that longitudinally over time it works.

NS: That reminds me of the scene where you pick out a pickle from a fridge, you are talking about your change in eating habits in celibacy and relishing eating this pickle, which may seem small but is a choice that broke from other habits.

MF: I think when you stop the work of differentiating between your own tastes and desires and wishes and hates and the ones that you’ve internalized—it’s really hard work—it makes the possibilities for that kind of sublime experience, for that sensual experience of, oh my God, cold, crispy pickle in the middle of the night, exactly when I want it. It’s like ecstasy, you know? Like having your first orgasm. 

NS: That’s how I read it. That’s why I was like, this book’s still wet. It really felt like, has she gone feral? What was amazing to me is that celibacy became an act of heightened senses. And you could feel that insistence on the senses early on. I’m thinking of the women’s love and sex addict recovery meeting. You watched woman after woman pledge to abstain from masturbation in their celibacy. You did not. Can you talk about that choice? 

MF: For a lot of people in that kind of recovery, masturbation is part of it, at least in their early period. It’s like a detox period. And for me, I had an initial sort of revulsion to that idea. It didn’t feel like the protectiveness with which I resist letting go of something I’m addicted to. It felt like self-protection. And so, it sent me down this path of really thinking what is this about? I thought: what’s the difference between how I act in an auto-erotic relationship or in an erotic relationship with another person? And it was really obvious to me that the answer was performance. 

I felt that there was a role I had to fill with other people that I didn’t with myself. I could enter into my auto-erotic relationship with curiosity or whatever mood I was in. I didn’t have to minimize or contort myself. But I have felt very constrained by meeting the needs or desires of another. That was an incredibly clarifying moment. Like, okay, this isn’t really about sex at all. 

Sex is a stage for this other more problematic dynamic, which is also how I think of sex in a more positive light too—that sex is a stage for different kinds of intimacy. It’s a place where we connect and enact all sorts of things, right? I don’t think it has an inherent value or purpose necessarily. I think we use it for all manner of things. 

NS: I love this idea of not assigning value to sex in either way. It makes me think of the research that helped you name “this other problematic dynamic.” You brought in the voices of celibate religious women, mystics, and saints, alongside radical queer feminists. What was it like to pull all of these varied people into a shared liberatory space? 

MF: It wasn’t a strategy. I was like, I don’t really know what’s happened in my life. I don’t really know what this project is. I just know that I need to stop what I’m doing so I can try to figure it out. For me, that often means starting with feminist thinkers, particularly women and queer, or genderqueer people throughout history, who voluntarily chose celibacy or divestment, not just from sex but from sexual economies. Maybe saying it’s a feminist choice is an overstatement, because they definitely make it for a lot of different reasons, but in a practical way, it is a kind of feminist choice. It is to step outside of the power structures that subjugate women, primarily. And it makes other things possible, because you’re not producing in that economy.

What broadened my thinking was reading about feminist separatists. They are deeply problematic in their ideology and in their practices, and that’s why they failed. They particularly fail women of color, trans women, and anyone who’s not like a cis white woman. But I do think there is a wisdom in that misguided practice, which is that you have to step outside of a system in order to see it, in order divest inside yourself.

So I thought, what other women were doing that? And what were they doing with the space it created where they weren’t tending to men or jockeying with them in whatever way we have to when we’re participating in sexual economies. That brought me to the nuns, obviously, and to some semi-cult, spiritual leaders. And all of these women over the course of centuries who were doing all of the things that they were prevented from doing when participating in sexual economies. They were making art, they were doing science, they were politicians, they were activists, they were preaching, they were doing stuff that was literally illegal for women to be doing and certainly that they wouldn’t have time to be doing if they were reproducing incessantly, you know? And I thought, oh, this is really interesting. 

I had another sort of light bulb moment when I was reading about young medieval girls of a certain class, who were looking at sainted women, who were the only women with any kind of power that they could possibly see. These young girls began to exhibit behavior that would hopefully be seen as a kind of training, as if they would be called to be saints. They would be going on hunger fasts, whipping themselves with nettles and just doing insane things. There is this great book, A History of Celibacy by Elizabeth Abbott, and she compared them to competitive child athletes who are working with the rigor that few adults can bring to any activity…in order to try to become saints?! It was more likely than being in the Olympics. 

NS: Wow, that’s where my mind went! 

MF: It was so obvious that there were no routes for women to be self-actualized in any capacity. They were like, “My one route is to become a saint.” There’s something tragic about that. And there’s also something really comforting. Like me, my friends, my mom—I could total all the women who have powerful intellects, big ideas, creative impulses. Where would we go? What would we do with it? If there was a one-in-a-million shot, I would try. I would be whipping out the nettle and drinking the pus of the cancerous. I too would have done it. 

NS: This sounds like a comedy sketch but it wouldn’t make it on SNL. Too real. 

MF: Totally. Like “girls’ competitive nettling.” 

NS: Lineage is kind of like a listing practice—a list is important here, a list of past lovers. Why was it important to you to make that list and what was it like to return to characters and themes from previous work?  

MF: It was very clear to me at the outset of this process that I needed to do something different and I also knew that the experiences I described in Abandon Me had dramatically undermined my own trust in my perspective of my behavior and patterns in romantic relationships. So this list was really a way for me to take stock and rewrite and find a truer narrative of my history of love. Like, what actually has been going on here? What actually happened? I wasn’t the hero that I thought I was. 

NS: Did you feel that it would contradict previous writing or did you feel like what you wrote was coming at it from a different angle? 

MF: A little bit of both. That’s always how progressive thinking moves in my experience. It changes. And I think that doesn’t necessarily contradict. 

I really tried to write this book without revisiting the relationship I describe in Abandon Me because I don’t want to go there again. It was hard enough the first time. Unfortunately, my early readers were like, “sorry bro.” This, to some extent, happens with everything I’ve written. There’s always something I want to skip over. It was interesting because I didn’t include a lot about it, but I had to include some. When I did revisit parts of that relationship, I could just feel the contours of how I had changed in relating to it. When I wrote Abandon Me, it was still so hot, like I was writing that book while I was still in the relationship. And I finished it right after it ended. It was very fresh. That’s almost 10 years ago now.

NS: I feel like that’s a good way of describing it. I don’t see the stories contradicting, but I see the heat signature being different.

MF: Yeah, it’s very different. There’s an urgency when it’s hot. The stakes feel high. That encouraged me to look at certain parts of it—the parts that I had been reluctant to name and I needed to name which included the harm that happened in that relationship. 

Now I feel healed from it and pretty distant from it, and I feel safe, you know. I’m not worried about reenacting that kind of experience again. So I can look at parts of it that might have felt threatening or lower priority at the time. I can really step back. In this book, I was able to look at it more systemically. I liken it to an actual maelstrom, there’s a confluence of factors. It was easier for me to look at that larger systemic truth when I didn’t still feel like I was a character in the drama.

NS: And I think in turn those people on the list weren’t characters either. It was more like research.

MF: Yeah, that’s right. I think in some ways I was functioning as a kind of detective, trying to figure out a truer image of who I had been and how I got here. I wasn’t reliving the dramas of those relationships. I was looking at them in a kind of diagnostic way. Like, what happened here? Trying to divest from my own ego’s stake in whatever form of story I had about what had happened and who I had been. The nuns and the other research subjects are actually the other characters in this book, along with the friends in the present timeline, Ray, Nora, and Caitlin. Those felt like the characters. Those were my companions. If this book is a kind of love story, those were the beloveds—my friends, my community, and the women who made up the lineage that I was belonging to.

NS: It’s so powerful to insist on that lineage as being an animated part of our life. Thinking about a lineage across your books, you’ve always had powerful things to say about bodily autonomy, but I was wondering if this experience brings other things to mind. 

MF: There were so many little micro ways that I realized I had been cowing to what other people wanted and had missed out on knowing myself and knowing my own body. Of course, that’s in some ways the whole project of patriarchy, right? It keeps us very busy looking at and tending to and trying to mind read, being inside of the consciousness of men for our own safety or goodness or whatever so that we miss out on the whole experience of being. 

My experience of bodily autonomy and raising consciousness and liberation of the mind is that it never ends. Even in the year or two since I finished writing the book, I was like, Oh! And once again, the great revelation becomes a preface to the further work…

NS: I had that kind of feeling when I worked on my book. I actually picked up Abandon Me, I had already read Girlhood, and I realized there’s always a space for us to keep doing this rigorous, thoughtful work. 

MF: Yeah. One of my favorite things about this book—that I think is more true than anything I’ve ever written—is that it really demonstrates how the work is a pathway and not discreet from joy. Like, I don’t do the work because I believe in the work. Eww. I don’t care about that. I do the work because I want to experience joy and intimacy and pleasure and freedom, you know? I want it all, and if you want it all you have to do the incremental work to get there.