An Antidote to Regret

Queer literature tends to center connection—sex, romance, and love. In her latest memoir, The Dry Season, feminist writer Melissa Febos takes a different approach: she spends a year celibate. Celibacy is a loaded term, often associated with everything from oppressive religious orders to the unsavory corners of internet incel communities. But Febos’ celibacy offers something entirely different: “This abstinence—not only from sex but from all the pursuits that estranged me from myself and reinforced a dialectical conception of intimacy—was a form of self-love, of redefinition.”