Melissa Febos doesn’t shy away from difficult topics. Her memoir Abandon Me describes leaving an abusive relationship. The National Book Critics Circle Award–winning essay collection Girlhood delves into past struggles with addiction. Her craft book, Body Work, covers taboo topics like sex writing.

Her latest memoir, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex (Knopf, June 3), recounts a period the author spent celibate in an attempt to escape damaging relationship patterns honed over a decade of serial monogamy. Although Febos entered the year of abstention convinced that it would be grueling, she was surprised to discover that her choice resulted in one of the happiest years of her life. Over Zoom, we spoke with Febos about her understanding of platonic love, the growth she experienced during her celibate year, and her motivation and process in writing nonfiction. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

You mentioned that The Dry Season started as an essay. Why do you think it became a book instead?

Oh, it just insisted. I would have kept it to an essay if I could have. In hindsight, I’d say that it needed a book to sprawl out in because the questions that drove the writing confounded me and ended up having pretty deep-seated answers.

In the year the book describes, there wasn’t any great explosive action. I just decided to stop doing something and do some reflecting, and then I had this incredible year. One of my main questions going into writing the book was, Why was I so happy? Now I can see that I went through a very conscious process of trying to change myself, which changed the course of my life. But before I wrote the book, it was this big shiny question mark.

How did writing this book feel different from writing your other four books?

It was so fun! There were parts of myself that I got to express in this book that I haven’t been able to express in my past work, partly because the most urgent mysteries in my life had to do with wounds. Early in the process, I was a little bit afraid that there was no story here because it was such a happy year. I wasn’t sure how to narrativize it; I didn’t know if it was possible.

In my life, I tend to be energetic and cheerful and ridiculous. I crack lots of jokes. I laugh a lot. I save the anguish for my work. Through the writing I’ve done, I’ve integrated much more as a person. The reward for that is that now I’ve been able to write a book that feels lighter. It turned out there was a story there, but it was a different kind of story than any I’d written before.

What did you discover during the writing process that surprised you?

One of the beautiful things about that year was that my friendships blossomed and grew and deepened. I felt so connected and held by all the platonic loves of my life. That was really meaningful and has never faded.

When I decide to give something up, I’m mostly focused on what my life will lack. I don’t instinctively consider what that removal will make room for. This is the condition of being human, but it’s particularly true of people who tend to be compulsive or addictive: We focus on the one thing that we want but can’t or shouldn’t have, not on all that will fill the vacancy if we surrender that one thing. In writing the book, I got to wonder at and catalog everything that my abstinence allowed.

Speaking of compulsion and addiction, you write about so many intimate aspects of your life. How do you decide what you’ll include in your books and what you’ll keep private?

There are certain topics that sometimes feel off-limits to me, but I find the demands of the story that I’m trying to tell almost irresistibly compelling. There have been areas where I was like, I’ll never write about that. That’s private. And then I start writing a book and, in the end, I always let the story win. The project of answering the questions that drive the book becomes more important to me than my own privacy. Also, as I write it, the book becomes a safer place to reveal those private details.

I’ve seen over and over the way that writing about a private or secret subject changes my relationship to it. As a result of the writing process, something that feels too vulnerable or too personal to share with other people becomes something that I’m comfortable talking about. I’m no longer scared of it, because I understand it more. I’ve made friends with it.

You come to realize that the benefits you experience that year are a result of divesting from patriarchy. And yet, as a queer woman who no longer dated men, hadn’t you already divested from it?

Unfortunately, even if you’re not dating men, you’re still swimming through the soup of the heteropatriarchy. That was true for me, and it was why the choices I was making and the behaviors that I kept falling into felt incongruent with the person that I knew myself to be. Why I would collapse everything into the one primary relationship and silence or minimize parts of myself that were otherwise central to who I was.

The work of awakening is never-ending. It has to be done consciously. Simply being celibate and not doing any other work wouldn’t have changed my romantic life. I had to perform an autopsy on my own behaviors, and then really internalize what I discovered, so that I could make my future choices conscious.

At the end of the book, you meet your wife, poet Donika Kelly. Was this ending planned the whole time?

No! I tried to avoid ending it that way. I didn’t want the reader to be distracted by that tidy ending or for it to obscure the point of the book. The story was not about doing all this work and coming to awakening so that I could find a nice wife. I didn’t want it to feel like I was tying a bow on the end of it, or like the relationship was a reward for my good work.

When I was in the process of drafting the book, I remember talking to my friends and editor and asking, What if I just stopped right before that happened? Because I really wanted readers to focus on what comes before. Everybody was like, “Ew, no!” They said, “You’re undermining the book. You’re underestimating the power of the story that you’re telling.”

For me, getting married was no great feat. The great challenge and the triumph would be in conducting that relationship with my wife really differently, really consciously. Everyone who’s been married knows that it’s not the end of the story. It’s the beginning.

The year of celibacy didn’t land me at a conclusion where I rode off into marital bliss afterward. Instead, it readied me for the work of being in a truly intimate, long-term relationship. That work has continued, even after the book ends.

Mathangi Subramanian is a novelist, essayist, and founder of Moon Rabbit Writing Studio.