In 'The Dry Season,' Melissa Febos chronicles a transformative year of celibacy
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. When I was a teenager, I got into the straight edge hardcore movement, which was this subculture of punk where the music was super fast, super loud, and it promoted a lifestyle based on not drinking, not smoking, not doing drugs.

And also not having, you know, a lot of sex. It was the first time I'd ever encountered celibacy detached from religion. And it seems different than, I don't know, staying away from cigarettes. Like even today, I think if you told someone you were sober from drugs or booze, they'd be pretty chill about it. But if you told them you were staying away from sex voluntarily, you might get some raised eyebrows. It just doesn't seem as commonly talked about.

But that's what today's book is about. Melissa Fibos' memoir, The Dry Season, is a look at her year-long journey into celibacy. And she spoke to Mariel Sagada, host of NPR's Life Kit, about why she did it and what she learned. There's a lot to get into here, so we're going to spend the whole episode on it. After the break, we'll learn about the breakup that led to this experiment.

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I had been in consecutive, committed, monogamous relationships for about 20 years. Basically, when I was 15, I started being preoccupied by romance and love and sex and those pursuits and how they made me feel about myself. And in my mid-30s, I was coming off of a really devastating relationship where I had become so abject and obsessive and really kind of

ruined my life. I had lost friends and crashed my car and my health had suffered and I had really just sort of gone completely off the rails. And I sort of had to stop and take stock. And I thought, why am I stuck in this pattern? And how do I change? And people had suggested to me for a really long time that I take a break from relationships and dating. And I had thought, yeah, you know, that definitely sounds like a good idea. But haha, I'm already

in another relationship. And it's sort of a hallmark of my personality that I have to be in incredible pain in order to let go of dependency. I identify as an addict. And at this point, I had been sober for 10 years. It's been 20 years now. But I was in the right amount of pain to decide to make a change. And I thought, what is the common denominator in all of my relationships?

And sex was the first thing I thought of. I mean, I'll speak for myself here.

sex can be like a drug. Not just sex, but the pursuit of it and the feeling that's generated within me knowing that I'm desired. I mean, you're speaking exactly to my experience right now. Within weeks, maybe even days, I realized that sex was not actually the common denominator I was

And that it was all of that stuff that happened inside of me when I experienced the sort of surrounding pursuits of sex and love, the seduction and attraction and flirtation and what's called limerence.

All of the yummy brain chemicals that get released when that spark flies, right? And sometimes that period of time before anything is consummated, before you know someone, is the most exciting and the most intoxicating. I mean, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that it is a drug. And there are, you know, plenty of people in recovery from sex addiction and love addiction. Mm-hmm.

There's a moment in the book that I deeply related to when you were with someone who was drunk and didn't want to take no for an answer. And you knew that you were going to have to be quite clear and verbally forceful with your no. And what you might have done in the past would have been to just cave and give her what she wanted to avoid embarrassing her. But you say, I was heartbroken to choose myself. Yeah.

Well, that was a really difficult passage to write. It's pretty painful to develop self-awareness sometimes and to realize the ways that I have compromised myself. But, you know, somewhat ironically, that's the only way that I can stop doing it. Mm-hmm.

Also in my 30s, I went to a cuddle party and there was kind of a workshop in consent at the beginning of the event. And there was a lot of encouragement to like, don't cuddle with anyone you don't want to, like very active consent. And still by the end of the cuddle party, I had cuddled with people I didn't want to. And at the end of it, I thought, what the heck happened here? Like, I'm a queer woman. I'm a feminist. I know all about consent.

Why was I saying yes to spooning with strangers that I don't want to? And I sort of followed that question all the way back to my early like social education in sex where I got all of this explicit and implicit messaging from

that it was just bad to disappoint people when they wanted something physically from you. And despite my sort of feminist upbringing, I still had this like very automatic sort of instinctive response that I should say yes when anyone asked anything of me, including physically, including sexually. And it's interesting because I have had these very clear epiphanic moments across the course of my life where I suddenly could communicate with my body.

And I thought, oh, God, I don't like this. Like, this hurts. I don't want to be doing this. And my mind was like, oh, no, we've been doing this for so long and it's really not okay. And taking a break from sex is a great way to sort of look at that and try to stop doing it. How did it feel for you in those moments of

to do something different in this period, to break a pattern or choose a different set of behaviors in situations that you had this script for? You know, it was really interesting because it felt impossible right up until it became possible. You know, I would acknowledge to myself, I want this to change. But of course, like making a decision and then actually doing something different are very different activities. And so I would be in these situations where, you know,

Right up until the moment I did something different, in my mind, I was like, oh, no, oh, no, oh, no. Like, I'm definitely going to do what I've done every other time. But there was this little scrap of gumption that was like, no, we don't want to. And then the moment when I do something different feels in a way like a moment of grace, like something becomes possible that was not possible before. Yeah, I can totally relate to that. It feels like...

What you did here, it reminds me of this other thing that I do sometimes. On days where I'm not loving how I look, I try to pull back and say, why does it matter so much how you look? It doesn't actually matter that much how you look. Like a body neutrality perspective. How do you feel today? What are some things you could do to make your body feel really good? And it's taking off the pressure of like performing well.

attractiveness for other people. Exactly. And I actually had a very specific experience about sort of looking cute in clothes because I had been wearing

heels of some sort since I was a teenager because I'm really short. And I just thought they made like pants look better on me. And by better, what I meant is they made my body look more like I had learned would attract other people slash men, even though I wasn't even trying to attract men. That was still buried in there. And buried beneath it was this belief like if I...

can't appear attractive or lovable or sexually viable to strangers, then that's a bad day. Like my worth, the value of my time and of my whole being is contingent upon my ability to attract and be lovable or appealing to strangers. And that is an outrageous thing.

That's so common. I mean, so many people feel this way. It was all the way in there. And I think it had been there since I was a kid.

And so I started wearing sneakers every day. I stopped wearing makeup. And it doesn't mean that I never wear those things now, but I feel so much more awake to both what I want and what my motivations are behind my choices. Like what else can I be thinking about other than what I might be looking like to other people? How might I be addressing or changing or participating in the world that I am not available for when I am constantly tending to that internalized gaze?

I like the idea, too, that it's like, it's not like you swore off sex forever, but it feels like an opportunity for people to say, let me just consider that this is not where my entire value comes from. Exactly. You know, I'm not big into prescription. I'm not trying to start a celibacy movement. But what I will say, as someone who's also been clean and sober for 20 years, there is so much power in just

stopping and pausing and thinking about what you've been doing and thinking about how you might want to do it just a little bit different. We'll be back in a bit with more from Melissa Fibos.

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So we just heard the whys, right? Why did Melissa choose celibacy and why you might want to think about doing it? But what did she actually get out of it? Here's Marielle. There's a shift in the book where you go from feeling anxious about your celibacy and sort of pushing against the walls of the thing to feeling more at ease and happy and unconcerned about sex. What are some of the gifts that came with that shift?

How much time do you have? There were so many gifts. After I sort of figured out what I was doing and settled into the celibacy and the abstinence as I was defining it, I pretty quickly realized that I was super happy, that I actually felt loved.

Yeah.

I had so much more energy for everything else I loved. I felt more politically active. My creative practice was thriving. And I also was getting to know myself in ways that I hadn't realized I was a stranger to myself. You know, there was a...

tremendous amount of energy and time and attention that I had given to my partners and to all of the activities around sex and love. And when I withdrew that energy from those pursuits, I had it for myself. I really...

this relationship sort of to all of life and to what I guess I can call the divine. Like I developed this spiritual sense of being in the world and feeling awake to the vividity of life

that I had, I think, really relegated to my love life before that. I had thought that, you know, I accessed the sublime through other people. But when I stopped doing that, I realized that I could experience it in nature or with myself or through art or friendship or all the other kinds of intimacy that are available to us. Yeah. When you first decided to do this, you said, okay, I'm going to do it for three months. Why did you pick three months?

So I picked three months, one, because that was as long as I could imagine not doing those things. That was as long as I could imagine not having sex. And I was trying to work with myself, you know, and knew if I picked longer than that, I probably wouldn't stick to it. I would give up.

At three months, I was so happy. And I also really knew that if I stopped then and went back to all of those activities, that I would probably just start doing what I had been doing before. And I was also having a great time and I didn't want to go back to what I'd been doing before. So I extended it for another three months. And then at the end of those three months, I

At that point, I felt like I was really in an active project of changing myself. Like in those second three months, I decided to make an exhaustive inventory of everyone I had ever been involved with and to basically make a study of my past to see what I had been doing and how I could do it differently. You put together a romantic slash sex partner inventory. Yeah. Yeah.

Everyone I had ever been with, everyone I had ever had any kind of entanglement with. It wasn't just sex. It was the emotional part too. And I devised a list of questions that I would answer about each one. Sort of like where was I dishonest? How was I self-centered? Like what happened here?

And, you know, I had a story about who I was in my past relationships, and it was much more heroic than what I saw when I did the inventory. Doing the inventory really showed me what I had to be accountable for and how I'd been complicit in every sort of romantic disaster of my life. Yeah. It's a hard realization, but it does allow you to move forward and to try something different. That's right. And so I extended it for another three months.

And at the end of nine months, I intended to stay celibate. At that point, I was really comfortable, really happy with where I was. And I honestly had begun questioning if I would ever want to be in a relationship or have sex again with another person. And I thought...

If being with other people is risking what I have found in my celibacy, I'm not willing to give it up. So I just sort of like stepped into the future as a celibate person. And what ended up happening is that I ended up continuing for another three months for about a year. And then, you know...

Things got interesting. You met your wife, right? I did. Yeah, I did. Who I didn't know was my wife, but the first person I was really interested in since I had decided to spend some time celibate. And she was a person who I thought I could do something really different with. And we have.

I have loved this conversation. Oh, thank you. Me too. And I loved your book, as you can tell. I'm like quoting it to you. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much for reading it. I love that you loved it.

That's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. Let us know what you think. You can write to us at bookoftheday at npr.org. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The podcast is produced by Chloe Weiner and edited by Megan Sullivan. Our founding editor is Petra Mayer. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Justine Kennan, Jeffrey Pierre, Shannon Rhodes, Gabriel Donatov, Todd Muntz, Shiku Teori, Martha Ann Overland, Danny Hensel, Megan Cain, and Margaret Serino. Yolanda Sanguini is our executive producer. Thanks for listening.

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