The Dry Season

From Melissa Febos, the national bestselling author of Girlhood, comes an examination of the solitude, freedoms, and feminist heroes she discovered during a year of celibacy and a wise and transformative look at relationships and self-knowledge. 'Only Melissa Febos could convince us of the ecstasy of abstinence. She never fails in her candor and precision.'--Katherine May, author of Wintering In the wake of a catastrophic 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 Febos, it was. Ever since her teens, she had been in one relationship after another with men and women. As she puts it, she could trace a 'daisy chain of romances' from her adolescence to her midthirties. Finally, she would carve out time to focus on herself and examine the patterns that had produced her midlife disaster. Over those first few months, she