Review
“Melissa Febos is a writer of singular wisdom and compassion, and The Dry Season is an utterly consuming and deeply generous book—an illuminating exploration of solitude and partnership, intimacy and manipulation, the stories we tell ourselves about the choices we make and how we might unlearn those stories to see ourselves more clearly. Reading this book, I felt an ecstatic, nerve-tingling gratitude, like it was written just for me—finding such crisp, incisive language for emotional knots I’ve felt caught inside for years—but part of the joy of this feeling was knowing how many people will feel the same way: that this book was written just for them.”
—Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters
“Melissa Febos’s The Dry Season will be called a book about abstinence, about celibacy, but it’s so much more than that. This is a book about obsession, compulsion, about self and self-lessness, about sex and love and art and faith and the capacity of each to swallow us whole, to obliterate us, make us anew alit with our history instead of engulfed by it. Febos talks back to time as she unravels it, inviting everyone into the conversation from Hadewijch to Hildegard, Foucault to Lorde, St. Augustine to Annie Dillard. The Dry Season is about reenchanting oneself with the world. It’s the best book yet by one of contemporary non-fiction’s lodestars.”
— Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
About the Author
MELISSA FEBOSis the nationally bestselling author of four books, including Girlhood—which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. 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.
