No Sex in the City

Tess Pollok interviews Melissa Febos about her new memoir, “The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex.”

By Tess PollokNovember 2, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

AFTER A DEVASTATING breakup and a lifetime of serial monogamy, Melissa Febos chose to take a yearlong break from sex to reflect on her relationship patterns. The resultant book, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex, is thoughtful and funny, exploring both her personal reasons for abstaining and the political and social contexts that shape our relationship to sex and intimacy. The honesty and humor with which Febos, a professor in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, writes her story resonates with anyone who has been through a difficult breakup or struggled to understand why the narratives they spin about their relationships don’t always ring true. Analytical, resourceful, and clarifying, The Dry Season is a direct meditation on the complicated connections between love, self-worth, and fulfillment.

I sat down with Febos over Zoom in September to discuss her writing process, the book’s surprising connections to the 12-step program, chronic people-pleasing tendencies, and the power of nonfiction writing to lay bare what might otherwise stay hidden.

¤

TESS POLLOK: What did you discover about yourself that you needed to address with celibacy?

MELISSA FEBOS: My intention with celibacy was to figure things out about myself. What immediately preceded the decision to spend some time celibate was misery. I was in a really painful relationship that destroyed my life for a couple of years. When it ended, I thought, How did that just happen? After all these years of therapy and 12-step, and having been in relationships for 20 years, how did I just have such a disastrous experience? Why did I choose that and why did I stay in it? In reflecting on the fact that I hadn’t taken any time alone with myself, basically for my entire adult life, I thought, Okay, let me take some space so I can try to figure out the answers to these questions so I don’t do it again. I lacked an understanding of myself that made me decide to spend time celibate, and during this period of celibacy is when things started to emerge that I hadn’t seen before.

How did being celibate affect your perspective on yourself?

The celibacy itself didn’t change my perspective right away, but I discovered that I was enjoying being celibate and I decided that it wasn’t quite enough—if I really wanted to address my intimacy issues, I had to get some insight into what was actually going on with me. In part, I was borrowing tools that had worked well for me in 12-step recovery programs. I’m also just an obsessive list maker, so I made an inventory of everyone I’d ever dated.

One of the things that became really clear after making that inventory was that the stories I’d been telling myself about who I was or what I did in my past relationships were not entirely true. I had always thought of myself as a hero in my relationships because I worked really hard to accommodate the other person and be a good partner, so I thought of myself as having this great emotional vocabulary and a good facility for intimacy. Looking back on what I did in past relationships, it became pretty clear that I was codependently managing my partners because I was afraid of conflict and other people’s disappointment. I was doing a lot of accommodating that no one was asking for. To some extent, it was extremely disingenuous of me. When I decided to get more honest with myself, I identified it as a form of manipulation. That changed my perspective on myself and my relationships pretty radically.

I’m actually in 12-step as well, and the way you resourced the principles of the program really speaks to me. It’s not actually possible or feasible to completely avoid conflict, but do you think it’s necessary for growth?

Yes, I think that a lot of people have had experiences where their relationships couldn’t bear conflict, so they ended. But my definition of intimacy has now evolved to be defined by its ability to weather conflict and maintain the connection, or choose to dissolve the relationship mindfully. Before, I had been able to internalize that idea intellectually in other areas of my life, but I struggled with conflict in my romantic relationships. I had a very basic fear of conflict and a persistent anxiety that a relationship wouldn’t be able to bear it. I don’t even know what the fear or anxiety motivating that was. I just thought I would die or turn to ash or something. In the book, I definitely explore the larger historical roots of that fear, because there have been plenty of times throughout history and presently where conflict was life-threatening for some people, particularly women. I should say it was never that way for me, but I had to rewrite my own story and the role I played in many of my past relationships. It was disappointing to realize that I was not the hero, but I ended up feeling really hopeful and kind of excited because if the behavior was my problem, it was something I could change. I’m a person who has changed many times over the course of my life.

When you talk to people about their issues in love and dating, it’s really easy for people to adopt a complacent attitude or even a capitalistic attitude, like, I’m just searching for the right person, and when I find them, it’ll all be easy after that. It felt like a much more pragmatic, empowered approach to realize that I needed to take a more active role not just in finding the right person but also in becoming the kind of person who could sustain the kind of relationship I wanted.

The main issue with narrativizing your life is that you’ll make the same mistake over and over if you don’t identify what it is. Do you see a lot of other women struggling with similar issues around intimacy and sex?

I see people across gender struggling with these issues. During the year that I was celibate, I wasn’t thinking of my problems around intimacy and sex as a social problem. I was thinking of it as a personal issue, and a somewhat embarrassing one at that. I didn't expect other people to relate to my interest in finding a new way of thinking about and looking at myself through celibacy. But I found that, as I talked to people about it, many more people than I expected shared similar experiences, and that was surprising to me. Even with people who had different experiences from mine, I identified with them because we shared a fraught relationship to aloneness. None of us were manifesting the love and intimacy that we craved, or what we did experience didn’t feel satisfying in the way we imagined.

I had a fear when I started writing this book that all of the involuntarily celibate people were going to hate me. To some extent, that’s probably true—those people likely read the description of the book and think, Okay, fuck her. But my experience with people who actually read the book is that they write to me and say, “I didn’t think I would relate to this, but I did so much.” There’s an analogy I draw in the book to my experience recovering from eating disorders—people who are bulimic and anorexic have the same category of problem. There are just as many people who have analogous relationships to love and sex.

Your perspective on other people’s perceptions of the book is so accurate. I was telling a friend of mine who can’t get a girlfriend about your book and she was really resentful of you, like, Why is it my problem that this woman has too easy of a time getting laid?

It’s so true. That’s why there’s the cliché of not judging a book by its cover. I think we all have our own sensitivities and we perceive judgment or threat where it’s not, so the fact that someone has a different experience is not a person arguing for or against a way of being. But it’s easy to make those assumptions when we feel uncomfortable in our own lives.

In a way, I’m glad about all of it because I couldn’t have written this book without having a sense of humor about myself. The truth in my life is that I’m quick to laugh, very self-deprecating, and kind of quippy in person. My work before this book was always so serious, so it was fun to write this book and just make fun of myself the whole time, even to show my own friends lovingly laughing at me. It’s a book about a super profound life-changing experience, more so than it is a book about sex or love—it’s a book about God, although I think it would have been even more problematic to market it that way.

Does your sexuality as a queer woman have any impact on how you approach these issues?

I mean, sure. I think that queer dating spaces are really different from heterosexual dating spaces. But I also think that, in some way, my sexuality disguised my issues because I assumed it was entirely different or that being queer and moving in queer spaces somehow protected me or immunized me from the compulsory heterosexual dynamic. Of course, it doesn’t and it didn’t—it just made these things harder to recognize. I think in relationships with men, compulsively avoiding conflict and people-pleasing your boyfriend is a much more identifiable problem. But when I’m doing that with my girlfriends, it’s easier for me to think that I might just be thoughtful. So in some ways, being queer made me slower to recognize my issues.

Ultimately, being queer facilitated the work that I describe in this book; namely, the work of expanding—not refining—my notions of love to be more practical and communal. And that is queer practice: an understanding of love that includes community, justice work, creativity, and harm reduction. I had a lifelong model for understanding that because I’ve existed in the queer community for my whole life and a lot of my role models are queer people.

What do you think about the loneliness epidemic? There are broad reports that younger people, Gen Z et al., have less sex.

I’ve been asked about this a lot because of the 4B movement in South Korea—no sex, no dating, no marriage, and no childbirth. I think plenty of people are having sex. I think that we have a greater awareness of what’s going on with other people than ever before and that refraining from sex has often been a response to troubling circumstances. All power to anyone that wants to use celibacy as a political tool; that just wasn’t the case for me with this book. I think I couched the personal experience I was having in the broader political context of the book, but obviously I wasn’t personally celibate to try to influence anyone else’s behavior or make a statement. I did it because I wanted to feel better and I knew I needed a change to do so. It was interesting to locate that decision inside of a longer historical and political lineage, which I did. As a woman, choosing to divest from sexual economies is an inherently political act even if your motives are not. In many ways, the work of the book was parsing that—even though I don’t see myself as someone who’s politically motivated.

Does the book have a thesis on where people-pleasing comes from?

I’m not really posing a general argument because I’m only looking at my own experience, but the book is pretty explicit about tracing people-pleasing in relationships and how we might prioritize relationships above our other responsibilities and commitments (happiness, creative passions, etc.). Capitulating on those issues to sustain and maintain peace and intimate relationships has been a survival mechanism for women for centuries. In many ways, it’s baked into our socialization, and the book mostly looks at the social and historical undergirding of that impulse.

Do you have a stance on therapy?

It’s been a really instrumental tool in my life, my writing, and my relationships. I was raised by a psychotherapist, and a lot of my friends are psychotherapists. I don’t think it’s the only way for people to change, but it’s certainly a tool that’s been hugely helpful in my own life. There’s so much ongoing damage in human society and in our lives that we basically have to orient ourselves in a reparative way to even begin. That’s true for me personally—the governing direction of my life’s actions is pointed towards repair.

Life often feels like a labyrinth to me. A labyrinth is different from a maze because a labyrinth is unicursal: there’s only one path; inevitably, it all leads to the same center. For me, the more I get in touch with my own heart, my own beliefs, and my own sense of what’s right, the fewer options there are about where to go. Writing a book is like that too. The further you get into writing a book, the fewer choices you have to make because your characters and the story become more determined. I think freedom isn’t about being able to do anything you want, it’s about having the consciousness and ability to see the right next action—and there aren’t always many.

What influence did 12-step have on the book?

The recovery community sits right alongside or even in front of therapy as one of the most powerful agents of change in my own life. So many of the tools that I’ve learned, both for navigating intimacy and navigating change, have come out of those communities and that experience. I’ve learned a lot from other sober folks. In many ways, 12-step is at the center of my life, but more accurately, I would say that it’s fully integrated into every aspect of my life. Sort of like writing or making art, you know? I don’t conceive of my life as having compartments or discrete categories; it’s a fully overlapped Venn diagram where creativity, recovery, and intimacy are all intertwined and exist simultaneously.

The narrativization that happens in my work is a process of integrating experiences that sit alongside each other before I know what to do with them. I don’t know how to extract meaning from these experiences, so for me, writing becomes a process of integration. To me, that’s stability. If I have my social life over here, my home life over there, my work life, my creative life, all of that all over the place—they’ll just always be fighting and competing with each other. I discovered many years ago that I had to have just one life. I bring recovery and creativity into my beliefs about intimacy and my community, into my teaching, into my creative practice. They’re all sort of bound up together. That’s the only way I can maintain all of these practices and nourish them. If I couldn’t somehow integrate all these areas into my work life and creative life and relationships, I would be very mentally unhealthy.

What do you hope people take away from the book?

My main hope when I write personal narrative—or when I’m putting my story into a social or political context as I am with this book—is that it locates the experience of the person reading it as well. I want them to feel connected to me and to a larger network of people who share their experiences. If I imagine a reader while I’m writing, it’s someone who feels alone in their experience or thinks that their suffering is the consequence of a personal flaw. Those feelings are usually part of a centuries-long momentum of social dynamics in a way that’s quite ordinary and comforting.

What drew you to memoir as a genre?

I never expected to be a memoirist. It just turned out that memoir was the form that my work needed to take. And by my work, I don’t mean my writing; I mean my work on this earth, my work inside myself. I think I’m a very secretive person, so I needed the headline of nonfiction to help me tell the truth of my experiences. It helped me tell the truth to myself. For me, writing nonfiction is almost like a kind of truth serum; it’s just so much more honest than fiction.

Writing a memoir is fun and rewarding because it has the power to change the writer so directly. For me, writing my memoir was a process of changing my relationship to my own experience very directly, much more directly than when I write fiction. It has miraculous potential for change—changing perspective, undoing shame, freeing oneself from a fraught relationship to the past. I’m a great champion of memoir.

Does the book have any inspirations?

I see myself as part of a long tradition of queer people and women telling their stories. I’m teaching a class this semester called “The History of the Essay,” and, of course, I’m teaching it like it’s my own personal history of the essay. It’s so fun to read Margery Kempe and St. Augustine and Montaigne all at once, drawing a line from medieval mystic nuns to second-wave feminists like Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich. I’m always thinking about what it means to be a part of that history, and particularly with this book, I’m really interested in women and other radical writers who chose to divest themselves from harmful and problematic economies, particularly sexual economies, so that they could have an experience of love that was bigger and more community-oriented.

¤

Melissa Febos is the national best-selling author of four books, including Girlhood (2021)—which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism—and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative (2022). She has been awarded prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, LAMBDA Literary, the National Endowment for the Arts, the British Library, the Black Mountain Institute, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Best American Essays, Vogue, The Sewanee Review, New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Febos is a full professor at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly.

¤

Featured image: Photo of Melissa Febos by Beowulf Sheehan.