Unveiling Desire and Deprivation: Inside Melissa Febos’ Provocative Year Without Sex
As a writer, I took particular solace in these sentences: “The writer of a memoir is both the director and a character in her play, and thus enjoys refuge outside of its narrative. An author is the god of their story and must sustain the long view, the cool curatorial eye. I wanted my art to be beautiful, even when it described something ugly.”
Writers and readers alike will adore The Dry Season. It is Febos’ best memoir to date and deserves every accolade.
Meet the Contributor
Brian Watson’s essays on queerness and Japan have been published in The Audacity’s Emerging Writer series and TriQuarterly, among other places. An excerpt from CRYING IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE, their memoir’s manuscript, was recently accepted by Stone Canoe for the September 2025 issue. They were named a finalist in the 2024 Iron Horse Literary Review long-form essay contest and won an honorable mention in the 2024 Writer’s Digest Annual Writing Competition. They share OUT OF JAPAN, their Substack newsletter, with more than 600 subscribers. In 2011, their published translation of a Japanese short story, MIDNIGHT ENCOUNTERS, by Tei’ichi Hirai, was nominated for a Science Fiction and Translation Fantasy Award.
