For Melissa Febos, the year she intentionally abstained from sex was no hardship, said Thessaly La Force in The New York Times. It was instead, she writes, “the most erotic year of my life.” In her new memoir, The Dry Season, the 44-year-old former dominatrix, former heroin addict, and best-selling author of Whip Smart and Girlhood recounts how she hit a low point in her mid-30s and decided to engineer a reset by swearing off sex for 90 days. She had been in an all-consuming affair that ended badly, followed by a string of unsatisfying trysts. Those first 90 days of abstinence turned into 90 more, with added prohibitions against such habits as scoping every room for potential bedroom partners. Before long, it was a full year, and the first since her teens, of experiencing life without being emotionally preoccupied with another person.
Febos didn’t spend the year in isolation, said Sarah Viren in LitHub. She traveled, read, exercised, caught up with friends. “The experiences that my abstinence made room for were incredibly rich and vivid, and even sexy,” she says. She describes every detail of life as being more erotic. “Like the way the air feels in New York in late summer,” she says. “It’s kind of gross, but beautiful and fecund.” By the time the year was over, Febos had learned she could be happy without being attached to anyone. And that, of course, is when she fell in love in a lasting way, with poet Donika Kelly, the woman who’s now her wife. Febos at first resisted even mentioning that in her memoir. “That was truly not the point,” she says. The point was to inform other women that they don’t need to be having sex if they don’t want to. “Radical honesty not only benefits you,” she says. “It also benefits your partner.” | 
