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Kat Johnson: Hi there. This is Audible Editor Kat Johnson, and I'm speaking today with Melissa Febos, author of the critically acclaimed memoirs Girlhood, Body Work, Abandon Me, and Whip Smart. Today she's here to talk about her new audiobook, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex, which is, like all of her works, read in audio by the author herself. Welcome, Melissa.

Melissa Febos: Thanks for having me, Kat.

KJ: Thank you so much for being here, and congratulations on The Dry Season. It's so good and there's so much to talk about. I've been thinking of it as kind of a sapphic memoir on the surprising joys and feminist history of giving up sex, but I want to know how you describe it to people.

MF: I mean, that sounds really ideal to me. Can I actually put that on the back of the book? I think it sums it up pretty handily, too. Yeah, it's about a year that I spent voluntarily celibate, a year that turned out to be one of the happiest of my life and led to a total redefinition of my ideals and behavior in the realm of romance.

KJ: So, take us back to the time period you cover in the book, because it was a while ago, right?

MF: It was.

KJ: You decided to spend this year, it started I think as three months, and then it became a year. What led to this decision for you?

MF: I think it's important to say first that from about the age of 15 until my early thirties, until my mid-thirties, I was basically in nonstop romantic relationships. Committed, monogamous partnerships for about 20 years. Right before I decided to spend some time celibate, I had a really harrowing, very unhealthy relationship that was incredibly obsessive. I'd always been a very obsessive person, but at that point, I was 10 years sober, more than 10 years clean and sober—I'd been an addict in my late teens and early twenties. I had probably 15 or 20 years of therapy under my belt. And I just got into this relationship and it really was sort of a life-ruiner. I lost friends, I crashed my car, my health suffered. It was pretty devastating.

On the heels of that breakup, I surveyed my life and I thought, “How have I gotten here? I should be better at this. I really logged my 10,000 hours, you know?” And I thought, “Something needs to change, so I am going to take a break.” That was something that my friends and family had been suggesting to me for quite some time. I had been like, "Yeah, yeah, that sounds like a good idea." But like most of my compulsions and obsessions, I needed to get very, very uncomfortable before I was really ready to do something different. And so I started with three months celibate.

KJ: As you say in the book, you got some interesting reactions from people, because three months, even a year, isn't necessarily a long time to be celibate for some people. It's very relative. For you, this felt pretty drastic. How did you navigate these reactions, and was the drastic nature of it a key piece of it for you?

MF: I think I would've tried for longer if that had felt realistic, but I did know enough about myself to know that if I committed to any longer, I probably wouldn't stick to it. And for me, 90 days, the unit of three months, is a familiar unit for people who are in recovery. It's generally thought of as the amount of time it takes to clear your psychological palate if you want to make a change. To be abstinent from whatever it is that you are exhibiting signs of dependency on, it's a good sort of starting unit. I knew from the beginning, and I also knew while I was writing the book, that it was going to seem laughable to some people, because obviously there are plenty of folks who are spending three months not dating or having sex, and much, much, much longer than that.

But for me, and this was really driven home when I talked to people about it as I was undergoing the experience, I found that the people who were compulsively out of relationships actually had a lot more in common with me than folks who had a more balanced relationship in this realm of their life. That, voluntarily, people who are in never-ending relationships, who keep finding themselves in relationships and feeling powerless over that, and folks who are never in relationships and wish they were, who are sort of involuntarily celibate, both have a problem of extreme. Both parties have an uneasy relationship to solitude and being alone, and they kind of want the same thing. They want to feel more empowered and to exhibit more autonomy and agency in that area of their life.

“I’ve often wondered if it’s just because I’m queer, but I think everybody gets excited about nuns because we like something that looks like one thing and actually contains something totally different.”

Anyway, so I started with my three months and for me that was a really big deal. I guess it's important at this point to say that I define the celibacy very specifically to me and my history. I started with no sex, but very quickly I realized that for me to really make a change and really depart from my past behaviors, I not only had to divest from sex but from everything related to it—dating, flirting, texting, erotically charged friendships. Everything that triggered that response in me emotionally, psychologically, surely neurologically. I needed to go cold turkey from everything in order to really experience aloneness for the first time in my adult life.

KJ: Yeah, it extended to what you wore. I thought it was really funny that you stopped wearing heels and were embracing sneakers and clogs sometimes [laughs].

MF: I mean, to me, then, clogs were like a prophylactic. I was like “clogs?” It's really funny because I had this insight: I had been wearing heels for years, a really, really long time. And when I stopped doing so, because I was like, “Who do I have to impress? I'm not trying to draw attention. I'm trying to repel attention,” I started wearing sneakers all the time and I was like, “This actually feels so much more authentic to me.” And in a way, that was a clue. There were a lot of clues like this that happened over my celibate period where I thought, “Oh, I've been making choices that are not aligned with or motivated by an authentic expression of who I am, what I find comfortable, what I find beautiful, what I enjoy. These choices have been subtly influenced by the partners I'm with and the idea of attracting a potential partner.” I had had no idea how profoundly every aspect of my life experience had been defined by my preoccupation with romance. It was really kind of shocking.

KJ: Yeah, super interesting. I have a sort of silly reference point, but really the only cultural reference that I had seen to temporary celibacy or voluntary celibacy, was a Seinfeld episode involving George Costanza, which you may have seen, where he discovers that by abstaining from sex, he learns Portuguese and becomes super smart and reads all these books.

MF: Kat, I can't believe no one has talked to me about this episode. I was a big watcher of Seinfeld, but in the '90s. I haven't watched it since. And that sounds actually like the most similar popular depiction of celibacy that I've ever heard of, and no one's mentioned it to me.

KJ: It's really funny because when I heard about this book, I'm a fan of yours and so I was excited about it anyway, but it made me think of that episode. I was like, “That's silly.” And then as I was listening to your book, I was like, “She kind of had this experience.” Your world opened up, you had all this free time. So, tell us about some of the things that you had more time to do, or what surprised you in your year of celibacy?

MF: There were sort of different levels of revelation over the course of that three months, became six months, which became nine months, which eventually became a year. I would say the first level of observation was within weeks of starting my celibacy, I thought, “Oh, my God, I have time.” Very much like it sounds like George did [laughs]. I was like, “I have checked off everything on my to-do list, handed in all my freelance writing, graded all my students’ papers.” I was exercising every day. Also having these kind of long, rambling conversations on the phone with my friends that reminded me of high school, and really all of my other relationships felt really tended to. I was reading more. I purged my closet. I really just felt like I was rich in time suddenly.

That was shocking because I had no idea, I never even thought about my romantic life being the culprit in my scarcity of time. Then as the months went by, I really felt this deepening sense of, “My life is really growing and flourishing and kind of expanding.” And that was from that deepening of my friendships, my family relationships. But more so even I think with myself. I started to notice instincts and inclinations that I never really had the space to observe. It actually reminded me of the months right after I first got sober when I was redefining and getting to know myself in the absence of drugs and alcohol. I was like, “Wait, I don't really like to eat dinner at 6 PM. Sometimes I like to eat dinner at 5 PM, sometimes I like to have a plate of chocolate and pickles and cheese at 11 PM. I actually really love not speaking to anyone until noon and just waking up and going straight to my desk or reading myself to sleep in silence every night.”

I really started to get to know my own habits in a way that I had never had the space to do. I'd never thought of myself as someone who needed a lot of alone time, but I think I was actually starved for it. I just hadn't known how to recognize the signs when I'd been with other people. And it had seemed to me that breaking up with my partner was the only way to get alone time, and so that's what I had done in the past when, in fact, I just needed long stretches of hours in order to do the things I loved. I just really enjoyed my own company to an extent that had been invisible to me before that.

KJ: That's so interesting. It almost sounds like your early days, the George Costanza period, was like the pink cloud of sobriety.

MF: It was, I really kind of was honeymooning. Then in the second half of that year, I started to look for new role models and really doing some very active research into voluntarily celibate women across history, and started to really have a kind of spiritual experience and felt much more present in the world. It's just so interesting because I think when you say the word celibacy or abstinence or even the phrase “dry season,” which is why I chose it for the title, it's kind of ironic, when you think about withholding or absence or what will be lacked in that period of giving something up. But my experience was that my world actually grew tremendously. It felt much more full and vivid and abundant than it had before, which was really the biggest surprise of all.

KJ: One of the things that I love about your work is how it threads memoir with history and scholarship and literature and research. One of the threads in the book that I love so much is the nuns. It might be the Catholic schoolgirl in me, but I loved learning all about the medieval beguines, Catherine of Siena, and Hildegard von Bingen, who wrote the first written description of the female orgasm.

MF: True story.

KJ: I just loved all of this nun content.

MF: I mean, who doesn't love nun content, Kat? Let's be real. I've often wondered if it's just because I'm queer, but I think everybody gets excited about nuns because we like something that looks like one thing and actually contains something totally different. I think nuns, the idea of celibacy, seem like people who are interested in deprivation or that they might be boring. And it surprised no one more than me when I started looking for new role models, because I was trading in my old ideal of love for a new one, my old lifestyle for a new one, and I thought, “Who are the people who I'm going to look to who are living the way that I want to live?”

“The voices that we hear inside of us that guide our actions are the lessons of a centuries-long history of patriarchal oppression of women and all sorts of people.”

I started just reading about, voluntarily, women throughout history, and of course got to nuns really quickly and the beguines, who are sort of nun-adjacent, and was very surprised to find that celibacy had been the gateway for women across so many periods in history. A gateway to a life where they could work creatively, live independently, be in community with other women. In short, basically have lives that were bigger than just being in service to a husband, often that they wouldn't even have chosen.

So, I think, in fact, abbeys were places where women like me, who had creative aspirations and intellectual ambitions or political ambitions or activist ambitions, any woman who wanted to do something other than be consigned to a life of domestic servitude and birthing, basically, joining an abbey was one of the only other options, one of the only routes to a different kind of life. And so there were a lot of really creative, interesting, powerful, weird women living in habits. In addition to them there were a lot of other religious figures, as you can imagine, the Shakers and Father Divine and some folks bordering on cult leaders or members a bit, certainly some radical feminists. It was a really fascinating kind of ragtag group of people and a really surprising lineage that I ended up feeling that I was very much a part of.

KJ: I love that. It really upended my expectations as well, and leads to the roots of feminism in all this. And then that kind of brings us to the present day, where I wasn't expecting your experimentation with celibacy to really point to this potential future for feminism. I found it so empowering. I'm curious, we have seen celibacy used as a feminist act. You talk about the Cell 16 organization in the book. Today there's the 4B movement in South Korea. And considering the threats to women's rights and queer rights and bodily autonomy here in the US, not to mention declining sex rates among younger people, do you think that there could be a celibacy movement here? Are you seeing anything like that here?

MF: Yeah, I think there absolutely could be a celibacy movement here. That was not my goal. I'm not interested in starting a celibacy movement. I think there is definitely some overlap between those movements and their motivations and my own. But if I'm really being candid, my reasons were pretty personal. I was in pain, I was really uncomfortable and I wanted to change, and I wanted to be capable of a different kind of relationship. I understood that looking for the right other person was not going to fix my problem, that I had to become the right other person for myself.

In the Venn diagram of my motivations and especially the radical feminists for sure, and in some ways without even choosing to, I've sort of mimicked their movements simply because I'm married to a woman. My communities are mostly made up of queer people and women and nonbinary folks. So, I do kind of live in a very particular social niche. But I will say that I think my experience is quite different in what I've read about the 4B movement. I fully support them and I only know a little bit about it, but it seems to have a bit of a Liz Estrada vibe, which is like, “We are going to withdraw sex from men in order to try to manage their treatment of us,” which is something that they are fully empowered to do. But to me it does seem in some ways to still be functioning within a heterosexual economy, and it's about managing another person's behavior. My choice to be celibate was much more about trying to change my own behavior and trying to assert a different kind of autonomy within the context of myself and my own history.

KJ: Right. That makes perfect sense. I just think many of the deeper truths that you came to as you went through this year, about how much your experiences of sex were tied up in the patriarchy and expectations that you had just had handed down to you and things that you realized that you didn't really believe, I think could resonate for so many people.

MF: Absolutely. I think it's an inherently political subject. The voices that we hear inside of us that guide our actions are the lessons of a centuries-long history of patriarchal oppression of women and all sorts of people. One of the things that made this experience so surprising to me was that I had identified as a feminist, literally for my entire life. I had been in therapy for years. I had a head full of the right ideas, or my own beliefs that felt very consciously chosen, very deeply thought about and pretty closely observed in a lot of areas of my life. I think one of the ways of diagnosing what the problem was in my love life was that my actions were being guided by something other than my own belief system. They were being guided by a social conditioning that I hadn't really scrutinized and that I hadn't really raised my own consciousness about. And a huge part of that was looking at feminist history, looking at patriarchal history and figuring out what those mechanisms were that were guiding my behavior along this path that was so contrary to what I believed. I didn't believe in compromising my authentic self to accommodate the needs or imagined desires of a potential lover. I would have totally balked if someone had suggested that that's what I was doing, but I was. For a very, very long time.

KJ: Did you find that taking a break from the societal mold of not only being not partnered but not dating and not having sex, not flirting, did the reactions that you experienced to this differ in any way from the otherness you might've experienced by living as a gay woman or as a sex worker? Did you feel othered in any way from this experience?

MF: That would have made sense. I think I would have expected that if I had hypothesized about it before I did it. But overwhelmingly, what I actually felt when I would talk to people about my experience, and then they would share their experience, was pity for other people [laughs]. Because you wouldn't believe how many people would get this weird sort of stricken look on their face and be like, "Oh, you know, I've actually been in relationships my whole life, too." And some of these people would be married with children, and I would think, “Oh, God, you might never get to experience what I am experiencing.” The great luxury of solitude, of profoundly enjoying and exploring and getting to cultivate curiosity about myself and my own experience and preferences and beliefs.

“I really hadn’t realized before I lived this experience and before I wrote the book how many people felt that they didn’t quite have agency in their love lives.”

Truly, the experience I was having was so profound and so comprehensive that anyone else's judgment about it would have just made me laugh, and probably did. I don't even ever remember anyone being judgmental about it because I think I didn't care because I was happy. I was really, really happy. It was, again, quite surprising to me that other people related to my reasons for doing so. I really hadn't realized before I lived this experience and before I wrote the book how many people felt that they didn't quite have agency in their love lives, or they thought the solution to their melancholy or unease or whatever pattern they felt mired in was to go find the right person, it was to change the external elements in their lives rather than to change themselves. Even the people who hadn't been in relationships for a really, really long time, we ended up finding those commonalities much more quickly than we were observing our differences.

KJ: A part of your experiment we talked about was informed by your experience with 12-step programs and recovery groups. I'm a big proponent of quitting things myself. I'm six years sober from alcohol, and I'm right in the middle of trying to do this no-buy May, which has been really difficult. But I wanted to know from you, what do you think is the appeal of giving something up? Why do people love to quit? What does it give us?

MF: Oh, God. I think people love the idea of quitting. I don't think people actually love quitting things. It's really hard. People love to quit quitting things, is what they love to do. I think people love the idea of it because we live in a culture that is absolutely built around dependencies. Capitalism, its whole reason for being is to encourage us to be dependent on things that cost us money, that rely upon our consumption. And we treat love and sex like that as well. I think we are plagued by dependencies on things that we don't actually need at all.

For me, I think in some ways that is maybe the clearest definition I have for a dependency or addiction, is the conviction that I am reliant upon something that I actually would do better without. It's almost impossible to give up a dependency of any kind in isolation. It was impossible for me as an addict, and it was impossible for me as a person trying to change my patterns in love and sex. I needed a community. I needed the wisdom of people who had gone through the same kind of lived experience. And we are so isolated from one another. So, I think the main problem when people try to give things up is that they try to do it alone, and we can't do it alone. We can't swim against the grain of our whole society alone. We're not strong enough.

But there are models for living that we're not offered in the mainstream or even the way most of us are raised. A huge part of my undertaking when I was trying to change and trying to give up a set of behaviors—and this wasn't the first time I'd done it—was to look for support. To look for community, to look for mentors, whether they were living or dead, and to not reinvent the wheel. There's nothing I've ever done or tried to do or tried to write about that some feminist before me hasn't already done. So, I'm always trying to look to my lineage for answers.

KJ: Yeah, that's good advice for sure. Another thing that I loved about this book was all the therapy gems. I saved so many from the book. I saved your therapist’s comment that “you can never get enough of something you don't need.” I love that. I know you're the daughter of a psychotherapist, so I'm just curious, does this all come to you very naturally? What's your relationship to therapy these days?

MF: Does it come to me naturally? No. Oh, that it could come to me naturally. No, I think that because most of what people who don't know me see is the final product of years of deep thought and effort to find insights into my own behavior and experience and perceptions, that people get the mistaken impression that I'm a person who loves to self-reflect and loves to feel my feelings and think about them and examine what has happened and what my part in it is. But I actually hate all of that. I'm loathe to feel a single feeling every time I have a therapy session. Every week right before it, I think I'm going to cancel. “I have nothing to talk about. I don't want to, and in fact, I'm probably going to terminate with my therapist.” And then I go and have the experience that we do, where I feel my feelings and then I feel better, right?

So, in many ways I think that writing memoir is a kind of survival strategy for me, and you might understand this personally, for someone who has very incredibly strong drives and a tendency toward addiction, if I follow my natural instincts and drives, I'm dead. Literally, they will kill me. I can do it in ways that would surprise most people. I have bottomed out not only on heroin and alcohol and dating, but also on exercise and work and myriad other things. So, I need to put, really at the center of my life, a set of practices that steer me away from those inclinations and toward accountability and balance and consideration of other people and being in touch with my body, because none of those things come naturally to me. And so, really, I think that is one of the reasons I'm a memoirist. I never planned to do it, but it has improved my life and kept me alive to an extent that nothing other than sobriety has been able to.

KJ: Wow. Well, we're all very lucky for that because your memoirs are incredible. And speaking of which, you're a longtime performer of your own audiobooks, which we so appreciate here at Audible. Do you like recording your audiobooks? Have you gotten to a point where you think about how things will sound as you write them? What's your experience there?

MF: I love recording my audiobooks. I love reading aloud, period. I am a big sister who became a college professor, and a big part of that was just so I could read to people [laughs]. My autonomic nervous system just loves reading aloud. I will say, I don't think about the audiobook as I'm writing ever, I don't think. But sound is very, very important to my process. The way a sentence sounds sort of phonically, musically, is really at the top of my concerns as an artist. When I write, I can't really write in public anymore because I am constantly talking to myself, constantly whispering to myself, constantly sort of testing the way a phrase or a sentence or a paragraph sounds, because I really think that I want it to hit the ear of the reader in the way that I intend. That's a huge part of the aesthetics and the form of communication that it is. So it's always been very, very important to me that the reader hears it the way that I meant for it to sound. I'm incredibly grateful that my publishers have always let me read my audiobooks, because I don't think I could ever listen to them if someone else did it.

“I think that writing memoir is a kind of survival strategy for me.”

KJ: Yeah. Don't hand it over to anyone else. I totally agree with that. We talked about this a little, I know this is a very personal experience for you, but I am interested in what it might inspire for other women. Because I feel like women are just at this little bit of a historical breaking point, and women my age in particular had really big feelings about Miranda July's All Fours.

MF: Oh, yes. So did I.

KJ: It sparked a lot of discourse about women kind of blowing up their lives at middle age, especially through the lens of their intimate relationships. What do you think is going on here? Do you see this in conversation with that book at all? Or how do you think this intersects with women at midlife? Because I think that's just something that people are talking about a lot lately.

MF: Yeah. I do see it as in conversation with All Fours, which I loved. I think if I hadn't taken this year of celibacy, I would have blown up my life in middle age. Absolutely. It wasn't my goal to circumvent that possibility, but I'm glad that I did. In so far as I can speculate about the experiences of people I don't know, or whole generations or multiple generations of people, I'll say that I do think that when we are making implicit and unconscious choices based on social structures and conditioning that does not benefit our well-being or our authentic desires, we reach a breaking point. And I'm perimenopausal right now. I'm having all these conversations with my friends that I think perimenopausal women always are, which is that I'm getting really interested in saying no to more things. It's unclear to me if there is a hormonal explanation for this, or if I am simply at the end of my rope of doing things I don't want to do. I like to think of it as the hormones giving me a little extra muscle behind my pissed-offness that I've been doing so many things I don't want to do for so much of my life.

Fortunately, my romantic life is not at the top of that list of areas anymore. I think because I really had a confrontation with all of those behaviors and impulses and that conditioning during this year of celibacy. It really was a reckoning, I think, with the very things that encourage women to want to blow up their lives when they look around and think, “What am I doing here? Whose life is this? Who chose this? Because it doesn't feel like it was me.” And that's how I felt at the beginning of my celibacy.

KJ: You make such a good point in the book about how we can look to these nuns, or artists from history. If women in the Middle Ages could do this, it's not like they had any more freedom than we have now, and they were able to carve out a path for themselves.

MF: Oh, it's such a helpful touchstone. I wasn't thinking about what might be happening in the United States of America when I was researching these women, but today, in 2025, it is really, really nice to have so much knowledge and to have relied upon the stories of these women who were literally being burned as heretics. Like, it was illegal for them to preach in public. I mean, it was illegal for them to be. In so many ways. It wasn't safe for them to leave their homes unaccompanied by a man, and yet they were making art and writing poems and politically active. It absolutely did not stop them from living in accordance with their true beliefs and their true selves. And if they could do it, it gives me a lot of gumption and hope for myself living right now.

KJ: And now, six years, however many years, after your period of the dry season, you're married to the poet Donika Kelly. Did celibacy teach you anything that you bring to your relationship now?

MF: Oh, my God, how much time do you have? Yes. I met Donika shortly after the year ended, which was the final surprise of that experience. Because when I got to the end of that year, I really thought, “I don't know if I ever want to be in another relationship again.” And then I met her and I felt a little bit differently, but I also started that relationship very, very differently. Everything about our relationship, and especially how it began, was really defined by the experience I had during that year and the insights I gleaned from being celibate. It is a very different thing to change your own belief system, say, about dancing and to study new forms of dancing, and then when you hit the dance floor, there's a whole other realm of learning that you need to go through. It wasn't easy to try to really actualize and concretize all of the things that I came to believe during that year.

But I was able to choose a person and I was attracted to a person who was interested in doing that work with me, and doing the work of really remaining differentiated, of being autonomous people who were choosing in a very conscious way to be together. Not because we needed each other or we needed a partner, but because we wanted to. That was very different from my past experiences. And we've actually been together eight years now.

KJ: Eight years. Congratulations. That's incredible.

MF: Thank you.

KJ: Is there anything else you'd like to share with listeners of The Dry Season?

MF: I guess I would just want to say that if there's any main takeaway from this, both for me and hopefully for people who are reading it, is that you don't know what's going to happen. The story we have at the beginning of an experience, especially an experience of so-called giving something up, is never the story that I have on the other side of it. And what seems like a huge sacrifice might be the most generous thing that you can do for yourself.

KJ: I love that. That's a wonderful idea to end on. Thank you for that.

MF: Oh, thank you so much, Kat.

KJ: This was a great conversation. And listeners, The Dry Season, written and performed by Melissa Febos, is available on Audible now.