A Review of A Dry Season by Melissa Febos
Rhonda reviews the writer's new 'Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex'
Image credit: Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash
How long is too long without sex and romantic touch?
Melissa Febos’ friends laughed when she told them she was becoming celibate for three months – many of them having involuntarily been so for several years.
But it’s all relative, isn’t it? What role and importance does sex have in your life, and why?
The award-winning US memoirist’s argument was that, at the age of thirty-five and coming out of a disastrous two-year relationship with a married woman that nearly totalled her mental health (as she described in Abandon Me, 2017), it was time to break the patterns that had got her to this low point.
And having been in back-to-back or overlapping relationships with men and women since her early teens, after a childhood of intense friendships with other girls (themselves romances of sorts), Febos realised she simply didn’t know who she was when she wasn’t devoting a large portion of her time and headspace to romantic entanglements and obsessions.
A Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex (because Febos discovered so much about herself during her three-month abstinence that she extended it) is about much more than sex – it’s about how to live. As such, it’s will be an indispensable toolkit for those who, like Febos, have been conditioned to put other people and their approval and desire at the centre of their lives.
At a time when dating apps and their frustrations, ghosting, angsting over other people’s messages or lack of them, the arrival of AI companions and an epidemic of sexless marriages and long-term relationships (and resultant infidelities and affairs), it undoubtedly is critical that we start asking hard questions such as exactly what we mean when we say the word ‘love, or whatever that was’, as Febos has it.
Love, as we barely ever admit to ourselves, is transactional. We seek out in others what they can give us – status, security, company of course, but mainly a reflection of the person we want to see ourselves as. We chose partners who validate us as we are and therefore sanction our childhood wounds and self-destructive tendencies rather than challenge us to heal and grow.
And as such, as Febos extrapolates, ‘love’ comes with a price: the price of losing oneself, or at least parts of oneself – of not living authentically. And also the price of lost time and not achieving what you could have achieved where you not spending so much time thinking about – and often idolising – another imperfect human being who doesn’t warrant being put on a pedestal.
Although there’s a lot in here from Febos’ own experiences, and a lot of that is very readably juicy (for a time, when she was at college, she earned her crust as dominatrix, as documented in her 2010 book Whip Smart), Febos’ three-pronged approach to this subject takes it way beyond the realm of navel-gazing (she has written a lot of memoir - 2021 also saw the publication of Girlhood).
One of those prongs is feminist history and famous women who have put themselves and their art or religious beliefs before sex to the point of excluding it from their lives. Febos goes to Bloomsbury and Lewes to seek out the ghost of Virginia Woolf, for example, then travels on to the German Rhineland to commune with the spirit of Benedictine abbess and polymath (writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, and medical writer and practitioner) Hildegard of Bingen.
Other, more modern-day women who have written on a similar topic, who Febos doesn’t reference here but who add to the growing discourse on whether putting relationships front and centre is a de facto good thing, are Hephzibah Anderson in Chastened (2009), Elizabeth Gilbert in her 2013 essay on how important it is for a woman to learn to be lonely. and Emma Forrest in Busy Being Free (2022)
Ultimately, through diving deep into loneliness, communing with nature, immersing herself in the lives and philosophies of the solitary-minded feminists, and putting more into on her platonic relationships, what Febos finds and presents to us is a different kind of ecstasy – the thrill of living on her own terms without distraction or guilt, and in fact ’the most sensual year’ of her life. And A Dry Season is in that sense a paean to paying attention to the world, to small details, and to nature, and to a very personal kind of faith that comes out of all that – something Buddhist in essence.
By the end of the book, Febos has exited celibacy and eased herself into a much calmer and more equitable kind of relationship with her now-wife Donika. But she is only to do this because of the work she has done on herself and because she has learnt to put herself, and most crucially her life mission, first. Like many women’s memoirs or works of auto-fiction, A Dry Season is really a celebration of writing itself as salvation from the mess of being human.
If you want to cut to the chase (for me the book, charming as it is, reads a little long, at about 264 pages – it would have benefitted from some sharper editing), there’s a final page and a half of twelve pretty stern calls to action that include ‘letting go of the high and power trip of sexual charisma’ – a kind of manifesto for inwardness and healthy relationships in all human interactions.
And key to the idea of emotional health, for Febos, is the problem of ‘empty consent’ –the inability to say ‘no’ through concern for, or more often fear, of other people’s feelings, and as as a way of not losing their approval or desire for you (echoing Liz Gilbert’s famous conversation with Oprah in which she said ‘I spent a lot of my childhood looking in people’s faces for what they wanted the answer to be.’)
Empty consent includes agreeing to unwanted sex for the sake of not being moaned at, cajoled or bullied. Empty consent is about all the ways in which women, not exclusively but especially, are programmed to collaborate in their own diminishment by saying yes to things they don’t really want, including unsatisfactory relationships.
In short, Febos’ message is that women simply have to stop being so damn nice and accommodating and get better at saying no to what doesn’t serve them. And that is some kind of long-overdue revolution.
A Dry Season is published by Canongate Books, £16.99