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jennabritton 's review for:
The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex
by Melissa Febos
It’s bittersweet that the experience of reading this gorgeous, thoughtful book is over. My own fault for tearing through it in just three days, but I couldn’t help myself — I love the way Melissa explores the contours of her own psyche and life experience.
And I’m not surprised. I’ve loved each of Melissa’s books before, and was so enormously excited to receive an ARC for this one; one I’m excited to read all over again when it’s released in June.
In The Dry Season, as in her previous books, Melissa is so honest, often funny, so curious and considered in her approach to the wisdom that’s come from women before and the wisdom she has gleaned from her own life.
Like Melissa at the start of this book, I’ve been consistently romantically partnered since high school, and often wondered — even as I’m now in a partnership I love — if I would benefit from time alone.
“I was reassured by the fact that I never felt afraid to be alone,” Melissa writes. “I did not consider how one might not ever feel the thing she had successfully outrun.”
Oof.
That was one of many lines I loved that I copied down in my notebook — lines that turned into paragraphs that turned into page after page of Melissa’s words I wanted to remember.
The Dry Season is a book about Melissa’s year of celibacy, yes, but it’s also about the internal narratives we carry into relationships and the relationships we forge (or don’t) with ourselves and our own connection to spirituality; about how having a deeper connection to these inner relationships can allow us to be in relationship with another without needing to be validated or "made whole" by their existence. I can’t think of a single person who wouldn’t benefit from, at the very least, witnessing Melissa’s exploration into the depths of those narratives and relationships from her past.
Much like when I read Leslie Jamison’s Splinters last year (or The Recovering back in 2018), when I read this book, I was struck not just by how much I related to Melissa’s personal experience, but also by how much I desired to interrogate and excavate my own experience like her as a writer.
What a gift to get to read from her again.
And I’m not surprised. I’ve loved each of Melissa’s books before, and was so enormously excited to receive an ARC for this one; one I’m excited to read all over again when it’s released in June.
In The Dry Season, as in her previous books, Melissa is so honest, often funny, so curious and considered in her approach to the wisdom that’s come from women before and the wisdom she has gleaned from her own life.
Like Melissa at the start of this book, I’ve been consistently romantically partnered since high school, and often wondered — even as I’m now in a partnership I love — if I would benefit from time alone.
“I was reassured by the fact that I never felt afraid to be alone,” Melissa writes. “I did not consider how one might not ever feel the thing she had successfully outrun.”
Oof.
That was one of many lines I loved that I copied down in my notebook — lines that turned into paragraphs that turned into page after page of Melissa’s words I wanted to remember.
The Dry Season is a book about Melissa’s year of celibacy, yes, but it’s also about the internal narratives we carry into relationships and the relationships we forge (or don’t) with ourselves and our own connection to spirituality; about how having a deeper connection to these inner relationships can allow us to be in relationship with another without needing to be validated or "made whole" by their existence. I can’t think of a single person who wouldn’t benefit from, at the very least, witnessing Melissa’s exploration into the depths of those narratives and relationships from her past.
Much like when I read Leslie Jamison’s Splinters last year (or The Recovering back in 2018), when I read this book, I was struck not just by how much I related to Melissa’s personal experience, but also by how much I desired to interrogate and excavate my own experience like her as a writer.
What a gift to get to read from her again.