An antidote to regret

Maya Lerman in conversation with Melissa Febos.

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.”

Febos’ approach to memoir is startlingly honest. What others may dismiss as ‘navel-gazing,’ Febos embraces as a sincere practice of self-actualization; writing about herself and her relationships as if she’s letting you in on an intimate secret. The Dry Season weaves Febos’ personal stories with a history of women and queer people who took similar vows of celibacy—from Hildegard of Bingen to the Beguines—placing her practice in a lineage of those pursuing alternative avenues for sexual liberation. 

Febos is not trying to convince you to give up sex. Still, her method—of finding oneself through writing, through divestment from the romance economy, and even through God—is certainly seductive. —Maya Lerman

Maya Lerman: Obviously the book is not a self-help book, you don't evangelize about celibacy, but it is about implementing a change, going through a personal revolution as you term it. 

Melissa Febos: I don't love self-help. It seems to me to be a genre that capitalizes on a very common desire: we want someone else to give us a solution or to promise us that there's a simple solution to something that definitely does not have a simple solution. I would say that memoir is just art. But interpreted more loosely, I think my work is self-help, but it's just me helping myself and making that process transparent to other people.

ML: What is your thought process when you have a private moment that you're going to turn into writing or art?

MF: I have a set of instincts in me that lead me to do many things. And writing is often a practice that comes after I've already done the thing and is often driven by the question of, “Why did I do that?” Once in a while, that thought will occur to me as I'm living, but mostly I see it as a survival mechanism. It's not a mercenary impulse. It’s not like, “I'm going to do this interesting wacky thing so that I can go write about it.” It's more like, “I am undergoing this incredibly difficult thing, let me fantasize about a way to make it worth living through.” And writing is usually the answer to that for me. It's sort of an antidote to regret.

ML: I want to ask about the politics of the practice of celibacy, because it is associated with conservatism and purity politics that seem incompatible with your feminist project. Talk about the way you rethink celibacy in the memoir.

MF: My initial conception of the book was that it would have a much more comprehensive treatment of celibacy as a world practice. And then almost immediately after that, when I started returning to research, I thought, “Absolutely not.” 

I have no interest in reading about men or pedophiles. I wasn't interested in writing about forms of celibacy that were harmful or enabled harm. The research was about people throughout history who had experienced celibacy the way that I had, which is as a doorway to a more liberated consciousness and a larger, more radical definition of love that was not based in heterosexual history, or maybe was an ancient response to the binds of heterosexual economies. 

So I came to see celibacy as a really big umbrella because for lots of people, it's a sincere desire to place one's passion in the realm of the spirit, about wanting to love God or one's conception of God above all else. But it was also an escape hatch for people who had no other options. It was through religiosity that they were able to lead self-actualized lives at a time when that was inconceivable for them. My understanding of feminism is a really broad definition. It isn't contingent on the word feminist or anyone claiming or knowing the word feminist.

ML: How does your version of spirituality relate to your feminism and your attitude towards these historical figures?

MF: My experience of feminism is a deep-seated belief in justice, a life devoted to cultivating it in whatever small way is possible. And that to me is also a pretty close definition of the spiritual. 

Writing is at the center of my life. The Venn diagram of my interests is like, it's not a perfect circle, but it's really close. And so spirituality, art, making, feminism, they're all just different applications of what I consider to be sort of the essential truth of what I know about being alive, which is that there are a certain set of pursuits like honoring and respecting and working for justice for all people, relationships based on true emotional intimacy that aren't avoidant of conflict or difficulty, and trying to establish a regular connection to something greater than myself. 

And I do that through making art. I do that through prayer. I do that through activist work. I do that through my intimate relationships. There was something profoundly comforting in writing this book, in reading the writings of these ancient, these medieval women from just so long ago, so far away, and just that moment of deep recognition over and over again, across history. That really aligned with my experience of integration and wholeness, this spiritual truth that people have identified and tried to live towards as long as human beings have existed. I kept coming back to that in this book, it's not about sex, it's not about celibacy, it's not about romance. It's about God, as I understand it. The word God has a lot of baggage, but for me it doesn't. It's just the big thing, how do I live inside of it?

ML: I also wanted to talk a bit about where the memoir ends, which is with your marriage. What things did you learn throughout the memoir that have stuck with you? How do they apply to your new relationship?

MF: The satisfaction of a story's ending is very short-lived because the next story just begins. I think anyone who's ever been married knows that getting married isn't the end of the story. It's always the beginning.

 I debated about whether or not to include her at the end of the book. It just felt so tidy. Like, “Oh, I was celibate for a year, and then I met my forever.” I was like, “That's the opposite of what I want to transmit with this book.” But also that is literally what happened, and it felt like it would disrespect the integrity of my own experience to leave it out. Because it is really meaningful that it was only when I stopped focusing on that thing that I became available to a different kind of person in a different kind of relationship. And so it's been really beautiful and really challenging, and there's no way I would have been up for it or capable of the work that my wife and I have done together if I hadn't taken that time and done that prerequisite work. 🍒

SOUNDS OF THE DIRTYVERSE