Unveiling Desire and Deprivation: Inside Melissa Febos’ Provocative Year Without Sex
The writing in The Dry Season is smart and funny, and it blooms on the page like acres of flowers: “In the lesbian Olympic games, peacefully assembling IKEA furniture with missing screws on a team with your ex would be an advanced category, and we would have medaled.”
Equally floral, naturally beautiful, is the memoir’s topic. Several years ago, Ms. Febos realized that she had never not been in a relationship, segueing from partner to partner since her teen years. Those relationships crescendoed in pain, however, leading to one relationship in particular that she describes as a Maelstrom. That pain, those relationships, and their accreting traumas, force a grudging realization: it might be time for a break, to experiment with celibacy.
