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‘Brilliant and powerful’ ELIZABETH GILBERT
‘So full of wisdom and pleasure that you don’t want it to end’ MAGGIE NELSON
‘Only Melissa Febos could convince us of the ecstasy of abstinence’ KATHERINE MAY

A Vogue, TIME and Vulture ‘most anticipated’ book of 2025

In the wake of a disastrous two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break – for three months she would abstain from dating, relationships and sex. Her friends were amused. Did she really think three months was a long time? But to Melissa, it was. Ever since her teens, she had been in one relationship or another. It was time to focus on herself and examine the lifelong patterns that had got her to this point. When those three months ended, she decided to extend her celibate period, fearing that she had not yet gained the clarity she was searching for. She knew she was taking on a challenge but had no idea that this year would become the most fulfilling and sensual of her life.

No longer defined by her romantic pursuits, Melissa learned to relish the delights of solitude, the thrill of living on her own terms, the pleasures unmediated by lovers and the freedom to pursue her ideals without distraction or guilt. She began to see her life and her self-worth in a radical new way. Her year of divestment transformed her relationships with friends and peers, her work, creativity – and most of all her relationship to herself.

The Dry Season is a memoir of Melissa’s year of celibacy, and a profound exploration of independence, sexuality and deep self-knowledge.

Publisher Review

Reading The Dry Season is like having a nourishing conversation with a smart, wry and ever-probing friend – a conversation so full of wisdom and pleasure that you don’t want it to end. The example of Febos’s commitment throughout these pages is inspiring and rare; we’re lucky and better off for it — MAGGIE NELSON, author of THE ARGONAUTS The Dry Season is a brilliant and powerful meditation upon addiction, desire, seduction and the undervalued (and all-too-unexplored) power of a woman laying claim to a period of celibacy [ . . . ]. Febos is both unflinching and compassionate. A deeply important book, I saw myself and many women whom I love and admire on every page — ELIZABETH GILBERT, author of EAT, PRAY, LOVE Only Melissa Febos could convince us of the ecstasy of abstinence. She never fails in her candour and precision — KATHERINE MAY, author of WINTERING Who knew that a memoir of celibacy could be so stirring? A thoughtful, exacting study of the loss of self – both transcendent and self-abnegatory – that comes with desire. Melissa Febos teaches us that strength comes from vulnerability, and how a keen mind feels but also dissects — CAL FLYN, author of ISLANDS OF ABANDONMENT Panoramic yet whisper-close, so funny, exquisitely alive – radiant with ideas new and ancient like stars in a clear night sky — JEREMY ATHERTON LIN, author of DEEP HOUSE Melissa Febos’s The Dry Season will be called a book about abstinence, about celibacy, but it’s so much more than that [ . . . ]. It’s the best book yet by one of contemporary non-fiction’s lodestars — KAVEH AKBAR, author of MARTYR! An astonishingly rich and affirming analysis, through the subject of celibacy, of what it means to love and be loved – what real intimacy requires, what it urges and what it generates. The Dry Season is the best kind of writing: curious, erudite, funny and deeply humane. I’m so grateful to be living in a world that has Melissa Febos’s writing in it — SOPHIE GILBERT, author of GIRL ON GIRL Melissa Febos is a writer of singular wisdom and compassion, and The Dry Season is an utterly consuming and deeply generous book — LESLIE JAMISON, author of SPLINTERS Deftly illuminates how and why one’s sense of self is subject to change, mutilate or surrender when in relation to another and asks what happens when that stops. The result is profound – Febos embraces the ability to be alone and in love with oneself. The Dry Season is essential reading — A.M. HOMES, author of THE UNFOLDING Only Melissa Febos could write a memoir of her sexual abstinence and make it like a game of Cluedo. A profound, distilled, untying of a complex knot – Febos riddles out the ways we might subjugate ourselves even with the ways we imagine we are liberated — ALEXANDER CHEE, author of HOW TO WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL