Offsite: Melissa Febos: The Dry Season w/ Leslie Jamison | Public Records, Sound Room
Cultural Experiences
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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.
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. 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 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 fulfilling and sensual year of her life. No longer defined by her romantic pursuits, she learned to relish the delights of solitude, the thrill of living on her own terms, the distinct pleasures unmediated by lovers, and the freedom to pursue her ideals without distraction or guilt. Bringing her own experiences into conversation with those of women throughout history—from eleventh-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen, Virginia Woolf, and Octavia Butler to the Shakers and Sappho—Febos situates her story within a newfound lineage of role models who unapologetically pursued their ambitions and ideals.
By abstaining from all forms of romantic entanglement, Febos began to see her life and her self-worth in a radical, new way. Her year of divestment transformed her relationships with friends and peers, her spirituality, her creative practice, and, most of all, her relationship to herself. Blending intimate personal narrative and incisive cultural criticism,
The Dry Season
tells a story that’s as much about celibacy as its inverse: pleasure, desire, fulfillment. Infused with fearless honesty and keen intellect, it’s the memoir of a woman learning to live at the center of her own story, and a much-needed catalyst for a new conversation around sex and love.
Melissa Febos
is the national 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.
Leslie Jamison
is the author of the
New York Times
bestsellers
Splinters
,
The Recovering
, and
The Empathy Exams
; as well as the essay collection
Make It Scream
,
Make It Burn
, a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award, and the novel
The Gin Closet
, a finalist for the
LA Times Book Prize
. She writes regularly for
The New Yorker
and her work has appeared in many publications including
The New York Times,
the
Virginia Quarterly Review
, and the
New York Review of Books
. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn.
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