The Dry Season

A TIME Best Book of 2025

The award-winning author of Girlhood returns with a revelatory chronicle of her year of celibacy and its transformative impact on her relationships—to others, and to herself.

In the wake of a catastrophic two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break—for three months she would abstain from dating and casual sex. Ever since her teens, she'd been in one entanglement after another. As she puts it, she could trace a “daisy chain of romances” from her adolescence to her mid-thirties. And no matter where her partners identified on the gender spectrum, she always instinctively molded herself to appeal to them.

Over those first few months, she gleaned insights into her past and awoke to the joys of being single. She decided to extend her celibacy not knowing it would become the most sensual and satisfying year of her life. Unburdened by preoccupations that had consumed her for decades, she learned to relish the delights of solitude and the thrill of living on her own terms.

A reckoning with lifelong patterns and dominant systems of power, The Dry Season puts Febos's experience into conversation with those of women throughout history—from Sappho to mystic nuns to Virginia Woolf—situating it within a lineage of queer and feminist role models in unapologetic pursuit of their ambitions and ideals.

Blending intimate personal narrative and incisive cultural criticism, Febos tells a story that's as much about celibacy as it is about its inverse: pleasure, desire, fulfillment. Infused with her fearless honesty and keen intellect, it's the memoir of a woman learning to live at the centre of her story, and a much-needed catalyst for a more radical conversation around sex and love.