In 2016, Melissa Febos was waiting for her plane to land in London when she saw her sitting four rows ahead: the hot airplane stranger. “My seduction sonar locked on to her,” she writes in her highly anticipated memoir The Dry Season. Febos rolls up her shirtsleeves to tease some forearm tattoo and dangles a hand with “short unvarnished nails” into the aisle. Months ago, this kind of overture would almost certainly end up in sex. But this time, Febos — happily six months celibate with “little danger” of a relapse — is relieved when the plane disembarks and the stranger leaves.
It’s a fortuitous time for an abstinence memoir. People are drinking less, fucking less, and staying home more. Celebrities from Julia Fox to Drew Barrymore have extolled the benefits of life without sex; on X, a Lorde fan club recently encouraged followers to participate in a monthlong celibacy period to celebrate the rollout of the singer’s album Virgin. Last fall, South Korea’s 4B movement — whose adherents swear off dating and sex with men as an act of political protest — went viral in the U.S. as American women processed the election results. A quick scroll through the news cycle is still enough to dry anyone up. Meanwhile, those still horny enough to brave an increasingly depressing hookup scene aren’t finding people they’re willing to bump uglies with, let alone date.
But Febos, a University of Iowa professor and memoirist whose previous best sellers include Girlhood and Body Work, appears to have the opposite problem. “I realized that I had been in nonstop romantic partnerships since my midteens,” she wrote in an essay for the New York Times last summer. “Over the years, friends had suggested I take some time alone, but even when I tried, my sights always locked onto someone new.” In the book, which expands on this subject matter, a then-35-year-old Febos is drained by the end of a relationship so tumultuous she once rear-ended an elderly woman’s car while returning a text message. After one final lackluster sexcapade with an acquaintance, she reflects on her previous 20 years of serial monogamy, realizes she has spent more time and energy on her partners’ desires than on her own, and decides to go 90 days without sex. “It was time to meet myself unmediated by romantic and erotic obsession,” Febos writes. She shares her plans with a friend who has been single and sex deprived for three years. “Fuck you Melissa,” the friend tells her over grain bowls in Brooklyn.
Febos is no stranger to the power of detox as a former heroin addict who got sober at 23. Her initial 90-day vow evokes “90-in-90,” popular addiction guidance for newly sober people to attend 90 AA meetings in the span of 90 days. Febos doesn’t frame The Dry Season as a recovery memoir — she doesn’t identify as a sex or relationship addict — but she considers the ability to quit the tiny thrills that compel us, whether they are heroin, cigarettes, or flirting, as “proof of growth,” even if she’s not quite sure what kind of growth she’s after. After a therapist tells her she needs to suffer to make real change, Febos extends her celibacy to six months, then a year. The memoir braids Febos’s account with a running ledger of her exes and short histories of famous celibates she admires, from the ascetic beguines of medieval Europe to the ultrastrict Shakers and the Dahomey Amazons. The final product — which has been lauded as a timely entry in a “feminist Zeitgeist” — feels less like a sweeping cultural statement and more like a small exercise in self-improvement.
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To Febos’s credit, she doesn’t pretend her stint with celibacy is more radical than it actually is. “I did not give up sex to get freedom from men, though many of the things I wanted freedom from were inaugurated by them,” she writes. “I had given up sex because my life had fallen apart and I needed to change.” The lifestyle benefits of quitting sex are almost immediate, if not all that different from what anyone would experience in being single after a long period of partnership. After a few weeks, Febos finds sensuality in the mundane, such as naps and peaceful nights spent reading herself to sleep. She feels nourished by the nonsexual touch of a chiropractor; she’s “not interested in semen” but enjoys the ejaculate-like smell of Callery pear trees on her walk to a Tribeca book party. Happier than she has been in years, she pours energy into friendships and becomes hyperattuned to the ways sexual attraction drags out meaningless connections and cuts short meaningful ones. Without lovers to attend to, her mind comes alive, as in the episode of Seinfeld where George Costanza learns Portuguese and Euclidean geometry after a bout of mono prevents him from having sex with his girlfriend for six weeks.
But there are so many upsides to Febos’s celibacy that her experiment feels frictionless. She both has no problem being alone and no shortage of desirable people who want to sleep with her, from the elegant editor at a book party to the photographer who flirts with her while taking her author photo (“Oh, wow, I should probably do that too,” she tells Febos after hearing about her vow). Febos attends a Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meeting just to make sure she doesn’t belong there; when she leaves, she gives herself permission to masturbate during her celibate period. The low stakes of her experiment lend the book a meandering quality. Febos seems to sense that aimlessness too. “Why was I actually doing this?” she asks herself more than 100 pages in.
One of the memoir’s few trials takes place during a writers conference where Febos meets up with an ex-situationship. The woman, who’s drunk, pushes Febos to stay in her hotel room. The old Febos would have given in just to put an end to the maudlin desperation. Instead, she kisses her and returns to her own room, worried she has had a slight relapse and “heartbroken not to choose” herself.
Little by little, Febos reminds herself of her agency. The power of “no” is always there, like a pair of missing sunglasses that’s actually sitting on your head. An open bottle in your fridge doesn’t mean you have to finish drinking it. A naked stranger in your bed doesn’t mean you have to do the deed if you don’t really want to go through with it.
You don’t hear as much about 4B anymore. Abstaining from sex can be a means of self-protection, but the world is spinning out of control whether we fuck or not. Even in a moment as sour as this one, people tend to find their bedfellows. When Febos’s year is up, her bad relationship patterns conveniently examined and resolved, she meets someone: the woman who will become her wife.
