This author was addicted to romance. So for her new book she gave up sex

The writer Melissa Febos has a taste for extremes. Her new book, The Dry Season, chronicles a bold experiment in her search for self-knowledge.

There’s a seduction tactic that writer Melissa Febos deploys called “the gaze,” a way of looking at someone with just enough intensity to make him or her feel the weight of her attention. She used it when she worked as a dominatrix in her 20s. She used it when she waited tables, depending on tips for survival. Sometimes she got it wrong, but the more she practised, the more she got it right.

She had been “emotionally preoccupied” with someone, she recently told me, since she was 15. Was that a problem?

It didn’t seem like one, until a particularly catastrophic relationship. Then in her 30s, Febos said she had lost herself in what had started as an affair, cutting herself off from her family and friends. When it ended, she knew she needed to be alone.

Yet she kept falling into tryst after tryst. The pattern was often the same: flirtation, quick intimacy, sex. She would tell herself that she was in love. Then, strangely, the chemistry would falter. She would begin to feel an alienating distance. She’d find herself going along with things to please the other person. Finally, she’d end it.

In 2016, Febos took a vow of celibacy. She was a former heroin addict, familiar with the steps of recovery. “Love is the drug and I need to score,” sang Bryan Ferry in 1975; Febos had found herself in a similar place. She set some rules for herself: no sex, no dates, but masturbation was allowed.

The Dry Season, Febos’ new memoir, is an account of the 90 days she spent abstinent, followed by the next 90, which eventually turned into a year.

“Deprivation is at the core of what Melissa writes, but the texture of the book isn’t that,” said Leslie Jamison, a writer and friend of Febos’ who read an early draft. “There is a lot of pleasure, a lot of fullness and vitality.”

Febos’ subject is solitude, but not loneliness. Pleasure, but not sex. She wrote, she caught up with friends, she exercised, she travelled, she read. Throughout, she posed a potentially radical question: What if all that a woman needs to be happy is herself?

On a recent afternoon in late April, Febos, 44, picked me up in her black Volvo SUV, wearing a white T-shirt, black denim capri pants and sneakers. Big Thief was playing on the stereo as we drove through the woods and toward the Iowa Raptor Project, just outside Iowa City, Iowa, which provides a sanctuary for birds of prey that can no longer live in the wild.

When we arrived, Spirit, a bald eagle, was celebrating his birthday. Two vultures scanned the crowd. Febos greeted a kestrel, a small falcon roughly the size of her palm, warmly.

“I think I’d like to be a kestrel,” she said. “I think that’s what people imagine I’m like after they read me. But I’m more like a raccoon. You know, just digging through your trash. When you turn on the lights, they put up their little paws.”

Febos has an extreme side. In Massachusetts, where she grew up, she dropped out of high school because she thought she was smarter than her teachers. She became addicted to heroin shortly afterward. She was an obsessive runner, logging over 16km a day, until she discovered in 2021 that she had herniated a spinal disc the previous year. A doctor described it as “a jelly doughnut that had been smashed”.

“I could get addicted to beet salad, and it would still ruin my life,” she said.

Going celibate, she acknowledges, was another extreme. The hardest part, though, wasn’t going without sex, but “confronting the truer story of who I’d been in love. Letting go of my own narrative of myself in favour of a more humbling and more honest one”.

That time allowed her to focus on not just herself, but her past: her string of exes, her pattern of ghosting, her need to be desired, her tendency to sleep with people she wanted to befriend.

Her friends and family welcomed the decision. A few raised an eyebrow. Others found themselves curious about doing the same.

Febos is queer and describes herself as largely operating out of heterosexual frameworks of love and partnership. She never intended for the book about her experience – now almost a decade behind her – to be so timely. It wouldn’t be the first time, though, that Febos captured a feminist zeitgeist.

In 2021, Febos published her third book, Girlhood, a collection of essays about female adolescence, drawing on interviews with dozens of women, as well as academic theory and personal experience. From one essay to another, she moves from, for example, an intimate teenage memory of masturbating in a bathtub to Lacan’s theory of the “mirror stage” in a carefully patterned mosaic of feeling and thought.

The book arrived at the end of the #MeToo movement, just as a wave of girl bosses and corporate feminism crashed. In it, the word “patriarchy” appeared 13 times.

On that point, Febos shrugged: “If it needs to be written about that much by me or anyone, I think it’s still a problem.”

Febos believes she isn’t saying anything original. “Interviewers at the time would ask me how it felt to have written a ‘#MeToo book,’” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Dude, this is just called feminism. This is just another wave of feminism. We’re just going to keep saying the same things over and over again until it changes, and it hasn’t yet.’”

Originally, Febos thought she would be a novelist. After dropping out of high school she worked her way through undergraduate studies at The New School and was accepted to Sarah Lawrence’s Master of Fine Arts programme.

In a workshop one day in 2005, assigned with writing about her life, she found the words pouring out of her. “It was the fastest writing I ever did,” she recalled. “And I knew it was good.”

That piece became her first book, Whip Smart, published in 2010, which documents her three-and-a-half years working as a dominatrix while also trying to get sober. Since then, in addition to Girlhood, she has published a memoir about making contact with her birth father, who was of Wampanoag descent (Abandon Me), and a book on the craft of writing, which is also deeply personal (Body Work).

She has surprised herself with the arc of her career. “I was a professional secret keeper,” Febos said. “But I’m proud to identify as a memoirist. It’s almost a political statement. There are so many biases around memoir, particularly women memoirists who write about sex.”

She is careful, though, not to dip into the confessional mode. Her books are more of a mashup of literary criticism and deep self-reflection (founded on what she describes as “decades of therapy”). More “H is for Hawk” than “Prozac Nation”.

Writing in The Dry Season about how she came to realise that something needed to shift in her romantic life, she says: “We imagine the need for change manifesting in blatant ways because that’s how it is represented in movies and memoirs and TV commercials: a eureka moment that requires little discernment. I must leave my spouse! I’m queer! I can no longer toil as a cog in this machine!”

“For me,” she goes on, “and I think most people, it is less specific and more atmospheric, a recognition of the air quality rather than a strike of lightning. Perhaps there are some who recognise the first signs and change with haste, but I am not one.”

At the end of Febos’ period of celibacy, something unexpected happened: she fell in love. A few months earlier, Febos had picked up Bestiary, a book of poems by writer Donika Kelly, and read it in one sitting.

“It was a sublime experience, like seeing Sappho for the first time,” she writes in The Dry Season. Kelly was in the process of getting divorced, but was already familiar with Febos’ writing. The two struck up a correspondence.

“Donika says I slid into her DMs, which is true,” Febos said.

They shared their first kiss in 2017, at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference, held that year in Washington, DC.

It was technically against the rules. But as Febos writes: “I had made a choice and saw the altering power of my intention.” Their chemistry, she observed, simply existed, like an irrepressible current. It felt undeniable – and different, because Febos was different.

Nancy Sowell, Febos’ mother, said her daughter’s year alone had allowed her to turn inward in beneficial ways. Through her experiment, Febos seemed to learn that “you don’t have to be so defensive in the world,” said Sowell, a therapist in Massachusetts. “You can afford to have your heart be open because there’s somebody home inside who always loves you.”

It’s the happy ending that was never supposed to be the point of The Dry Season, Febos insisted. Her initial draft didn’t mention falling in love with Kelly. But her editor at Knopf, Vanessa Haughton, encouraged Febos to put it in the book.

“I was personally scandalised by that,” Haughton said. “I was like, ‘Melissa, you can’t withhold that!’”

Febos and Kelly eloped in 2021 with a small ceremony on Cape Cod. Kelly wore a blue suit; Febos, a blue dress. They bought a grocery store cake with icing that read “WIVED” and went out to dinner.

They have put down roots together in Iowa, where they both teach at the University of Iowa. Last year, they bought a colonial house with oak floors and original mouldings, and painted the exterior a dark navy.

On the day I visited, a rainbow-felt wreath hung from the front door. The walls were decorated with photographs of family and friends and a print from artist Hilma af Klint.

Carl Jung’s The Red Book, The Beekeeper’s Bible and a DVD set of Xena: Warrior Princess sat on their bookshelves.

Kelly appears often in Febos’ books, typically as a foil, someone able to cut through the other’s insecurities and posturing. Here she is, for example, in Girlhood at a cuddle party where Febos was practising denying consent: “Donika leaned toward my ear and murmured, ‘Are you doing any unnecessary emotional labour?’”

Kelly says celibacy made Febos a better writer, allowing her to write Girlhood in the immediate aftermath. “Whip Smart is a really good book, but it has this posture that’s kind of tough,” she told me. “There’s a thicker shell. I think the work that she does in Girlhood was important to figuring out, ‘OK what is this? What was I carrying? And then, why was this year so good?’”

“It is mostly a blessing to be so well known,” Febos sighed. “Sometimes it’s annoying, but mostly I love it.”

I had to ask Kelly. Had she ever experienced “the gaze”?

She had, adding: “One time – this was at the beginning of the beginning – she looked at me in a certain way and I was like, ‘I can’t handle that. I’m not a god. I don’t have the capacity to deal with this much energy.’ I just closed my eyes.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Thessaly La Force

Photographs by: Thalassa Raasch

©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES

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