Toni Morrison’s famous comment on writing, one I sometimes put at the top of my syllabi, is this: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Woven into that quote is also an acknowledgement: sometimes the books you want to read already exist, and finding them can feel revelatory.

I feel that way about Melissa Febos’ books, narratives of the self that also comment on what it means to write about the self, how vital and political and historically consistent that act has been, despite those who try to denigrate or dismiss the genre.

Melissa teaches now in the MFA program that I once attended, the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University, and we met for the first time last year, when I returned to Iowa City for a reading from my second book. I was happy (and relieved) to discover that she’s just as generous and thoughtful in real life as she is in her memoirs and essays.

She and I talked about her new book, The Dry Season, in late May, via a shared Google doc, as both of our classes were coming to an end and as she prepared for book tour.

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Sarah Viren: I want to start with the subject itself. Celibacy. It’s the absence of sex and yet, as a discussion topic, it brings sex to the fore—an irony you note. As a book topic it also feels tricky—writing about something you didn’t do for a year—and yet The Dry Season is rich with material.

Can you talk about your approach to writing about celibacy? Did you struggle to find that material or the shape of it?

Melissa Febos: This was something that I struggled with conceptually—or, a question I had: will it be interesting to write a whole book about divestment, or not-doing. Relatedly, I worried that writing about being happy might be boring! I had never done that before, really.

But my celibate year was one of the happiest of my life. These quandaries sort of evaporated once I started writing the book in earnest. Even outlining the narrative dispelled them. Because writing about celibacy meant also writing about sex, of course. A huge part of the story was the story of how and why I’d gotten to that decision, and it was a long messy history of love and sex.

Also, when we hear the word celibacy or abstinence, we immediately think of withdrawal, or an absence. The story of celibacy is a story of not having or doing.

The experiences that my abstinence made room for were incredibly rich and vivid, and even sexy.

But my lived experience refuted that perception. The experiences that my abstinence made room for were incredibly rich and vivid, and even sexy. During that time, I was not focused on what I was not doing so much as reveling in what I could do, now that sex and love were off the table. It is analogous to many kinds of dependency, perhaps all: the false story or belief that we need something, when in fact, it is blocking us from having a whole slew of other experiences, richer experiences.

SV: I’m a structure nerd, so I was fascinated by the shape of this book. It appears in three acts, and at the end of the first two acts you renew your vows, of a sort, which is to say you extend your period of celibacy. There’s also a pilgrimage in the second act and a potential conquest that opens the book and closes during that trip.

How did you land on this structure and what did it allow you to do that another structure—one, say, more tied to counting down the days of one’s celibacy—might have prevented?

MF: Oh, I am also a structure nerd, so I love this question. My first conception of the book’s structure was that it would be organized around the research. In my insecurity about the dramatic tension inherent to the personal narrative, I thought it would function as a complement to the research, that this would be a very different kind of book.

Then, I started inventorying the personal narrative and considering what belonged in the book. I began by making a timeline, which I always do when I’m writing from memory. Like, I literally draw a timeline, sourced from my journals and emails and texts, and whatever other ephemera I’ve saved.

I start using chronology. I consider chronology my friend, narratively speaking, and if there is a way to tell a story chronologically, I do. It’s simply easier and generally more pleasurable for the reader.

I realized pretty quickly that the book would be a researched memoir instead of a research book with some memoir in it. I looked at the big events in the timeline, and the important turning points, and roughly divided it into those three parts. I find that my own process of journeying through life and ideas tends to map pretty easily onto a three-act structure, and this one did.

I wrote the first draft in the present tense. There was so much moving through time, so much importing from the past, and I wanted the “present” of the story to be very clear. Of course, when I got through the first draft, it was obvious to me that I had only needed to write it in the present. The book wanted to be in the past tense, as most books do. So, I got my little literary lice comb out and as I made my big second-draft changes, I also changed the tense.

(It wasn’t the first time I’ve done that—with tense, and POV—and while it is obviously quite tedious, I recommend it. Nothing helps you feel more confident in your craft choices, or your understanding of what, exactly, a particular POV or tense does to work.)

At some point in that process, I had the idea of splitting up that seduction scene that opens the book. It felt like a little experiment, just a fun thing I was trying, but I got immediately attached to it, so it stayed.

SV: You also have a number of gorgeous meditations on writing, particularly memoir writing. You talk about being both director and actor as a memoirist, about the way the lyric “I” opens us up to a “we,” and, near the end of the book, the connection of this genre to the Beguine’s vitae, a form of autobiographical writing told to, or by, a confessor, as a means of self-discovery.

How did writing this book help you better understand our shared (and glorious) genre?

MF: It helped me understand more deeply that we are working inside of an ancient and glorious lineage! Like, very truly. The greatest misconception about memoir is the most common one: that it is interested in a narrow subject matter; that the self is a limited subject, and unconnected to worldly concerns.

In reality, memoir scrutinizes the nature of lived experience as a portal to the world. All we know is lived experience, it is our channel to everything: the divine, social, physical, and intellectual aspects of being are all accessed through the body and the personal faculties of the individual. In that sense, memoir is the most interdisciplinary of genres, and perhaps the most ancient.

Don’t let me get on my soapbox, Sarah! I don’t really even believe in genre, but insofar as I do, I believe that memoir can contain anything.

SV: The Dry Season is also a book of self-discovery, one that feels surprisingly more revealing than your previous books even as much less is revealed, action-wise. What we are witness to instead is a slow reckoning with the ways you have harmed yourself and others in a quest for love—or what feels like love.

I found this slow reveal both gripping and incredibly moving. How is this book building upon and in conversation with your previous books?

MF: Oh, thank you! I’m so glad that was your experience while reading it. It was certainly mine writing it. Chronologically, TDS takes place after Abandon Me, and before Girlhood, but the narrative voice speaks from much farther into the future, which is to say, the present. I know more than I ever have, both about myself and about writing, and that comes with a lot more ease and humility.

I found myself more able to sit inside this book while I wrote it. That is, I didn’t need to distract myself so much with the aesthetics. I think it’s my most direct book, and the voice of it is the closest anything I’ve ever written has come to my actual voice.

One of my great hopes for this book is that readers who identify, who are seeking to expand their notions of love, find my story and consider it a part of their own lineage, as I have all of these teachers across time and space.

It also has a sense of humor, which is really fun. In my previous books, there were glimmers, but I had really saved up all my thorny and most fraught material and needed to sort through it. There wasn’t a lot of room for the more playful parts of me, and they are considerable! I’m glad I was able to make myself laugh writing it, and I hope that readers experience it that way, too.

SV: There is a story of the self, but one hardly limited to the self. You also bring in the stories and voices of several friends here, and even your own confessor, and you also draw from a community of writers and artists and mystics who serve as guides, and inspirations. These include Virginia Woolf, Agnes Martin, Hildegard of Bingen, and Annie Dillard, among many others.

You explain their importance in the book, but for readers of this interview, could you give just a short synopsis. How did this community of mostly women help you, both in your year of celibacy, and in writing about it after the fact?

MF: Early on in my celibacy, I realized that I needed new role models in love. I had always idolized women artists who were creatively successful, but also messy in romance—who seemed a bit compulsive or out of control in their love lives; basically, women who loved like me.

When I decided to change my ideal in love, I knew I needed new heroes. I began reading about voluntarily celibate folks across history and became obsessed with a lot of nuns, like Hidegard, and the Belgian beguines, but also people who weren’t necessarily celibate but had models for love and relationships that prioritized their art and autonomy, like Woolf and Agnes Martin.

These figures became my family during my celibacy, and still feel that way. One of my great hopes for this book is that readers who identify, who are seeking to expand their notions of love, find my story and consider it a part of their own lineage, as I have all of these teachers across time and space.

A big motivator for my writing is the desire to come out from isolation, to come into the revelation of shared experience. I am a secretive person, but beyond that, I think our tendency is often to feel that our flaws and failures and challenges are singular, that we are alone in them.

One of the great powers of memoir is its invitation to connect over shared experience—and this is an essentially feminist gesture: to share our experiences and thus understand how they arise out of a shared culture or society, how they are a consequence not of our essential nature, but of how we have been socialized.