Unveiling Desire and Deprivation: Inside Melissa Febos’ Provocative Year Without Sex
Let me now turn to my memoir-writing siblings.
The Dry Season is a masterclass in the authoring of memoirs that are both lyric—less concerned with chronology than with the import, the meaning of things—and researched. In her journey to and through celibacy, Febos draws inspiration from feminist pasts. She introduces us to the beguines, the “gray women” of the early Middle Ages who insisted on not only exploring their spirituality but in documenting it, things that few women of that era would have been permitted to do. She reminds us of Sappho’s poetry, of Saint Augustine’s laments, and of the oddness of courtly love as epitomized by Medieval troubadours. Her more recent inspirations are myriad as well. Nan Goldin, Helen Gurley Brown, Audre Lorde, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Virginia Woolf, bell hooks, Susan Sontag, and John Waters.
