I suppose I’m in the middle of a kind of midlife crisis, both parents dead, on the brink of what I believe will be marriage, fairly new to my own queerness, working a variety of wonderful and weird jobs. So reading Melissa Febos’s The Dry Season—a book in which this writer discovers her joy—turned me into a sleepless monster for a few days. 

This book burned in new ways because it showed me I have some things to clean up. To read this fifth book of hers is to witness someone unearth her own freedom, and I watched from a point in my life when I’m grieving and questioning how little freedom I’ve allowed myself due to my obsessions with those now dead. Ready or not, this joyful discovery of what life can be like when you choose yourself will get you wanting and ready to do The Work. 

Some of the language is deeply familiar for anyone who’s been through the twelve steps of an anonymous program. I'm hung up on how she can write a book so heavily seasoned with slogans you hear in folding chairs in church basements, and on the phone with your sponsor, but without making it cringe, cliche, or obvious, but rather, weaving that culture into high art. 

I wondered what to ask her in this interview that didn’t come from so messy a place in me that it made our conversation small. But Melissa Febos is nothing if not generous, as well as a smooth and savvy Libra. Where I fell down, she picked up, no problem. On the question of whether she ever felt she lost years of her life to roller coaster relationships that didn’t work out, she reminded me again of something I’ve heard in those rooms. “The very things that make me feel siloed and alone and worried that I lost time are the things that make me useful in the world and connect me to other people,” Febos says. “None of [those connections] would exist if I hadn't been so fucked up for so long.”

The Dry Season is about Febos’s year of celibacy, and the lessons and deep research that followed. Recounting, step by step, if you will, how she rebuilt herself from the inside, through solitude and inventory. “I hacked the design,” she said. “I’m happy.” This is no recovery handbook, but a seamless feminist how-to rooted in the ancient histories of women who’ve found their way before us. Febos’s writing and research, paired with her bare, zero-percent-flowery confessions make her the high-brow/low-brow, cool genius nerd hero we love. I needed this book without knowing it, like I've needed her others, and like so many readers of hers have. 

I’m writing this from Martha's Vineyard, where I’m attending a memorial for a woman who was like a grandmother to me, a distant anchor. This island is also where Febos would come for therapy as a kid, growing up in Cape Cod. Even if I weren’t here, even if I weren’t in the throes of grief, Febos’s books reliably bring me to my knees at least once, if not for the whole stretch, as was the case with Abandon Me. Her excavations of self are as ruthless as her edits. 

Read The Dry Season knowing you’ll lock eyes with it and it’ll work its way into your heart likety-split. I wanted the recipe for how she keeps that grip on her reader. 

“Being bored is a kind of death to me, or a death to my reading experience, certainly, and I write books with research that are pretty interior, so if I don't think about it consciously, it's boring. I think a lot about plot structure, and I lead with elements of craft, like narrative structure, that do not come naturally to me. I write incredibly long, discursive and abstract things with lots of description. It's bedtime stories, you know, absolute snooze fest. So I make outlines, and ultimately, in a book like this, I leave a lot out, a lot of research and reflection. My structural decisions are almost all about pace. I kill a lot of darlings in service to the reading experience.”

So with all this consideration of structure and a kind of performance of self, I wondered about how she writes raw life experience into these pages that hit like anything but performative. The big juicy secret is that she writes for herself.

“Most of the time while I'm writing, I’m not thinking about audience, especially not in the first draft,” Febos says. “I do think about structure, which I guess is a way of thinking about audience, but it's a little reflexive. I’m projecting a version of myself as the reader I imagine; she is almost always a version of me. I can't measure my work against anyone else's taste. All I can do is measure it against what I would want to read. So there is still a profound sense of privacy. It's just me and the hologram of me. I'm writing the book to please her.” So I do think the self-conscious aspects, or the presentational aspects, or the performance of it, is still very genuine, because I am doing the kind of thing I like. I love making art, the aesthetic part of making art is so important to the emotional confrontations of the kind of art I make. That puzzle of trying to make it beautiful or interesting or compelling is the structure. It is the work that makes it possible for me to confront the difficult feelings or move through the thought process and the emotional process of writing memoir, because it's distracting. It's consuming for me, and I find it very fun.”

Joy in the writing practice: imagine! Can you tell I'm in a dark place? 

I’ve known Febos a long time, but the way Melissa criss-crosses so many lives seems universal. The fact that she connects with hordes of people in this familiar and uniquely intimate way, is in fact, part of the premise for the book. This magic she has in creating relationships with people is a self-admitted skill developed on purpose, but, in her particular hands, immensely powerful and she's also learned and written in this book, how not to make that incredible talent a dangerous twin blade. 

“My earliest established relationship to writing and creativity was that it was a release valve for my codependency. I was working so hard to manage people in my daily life, and in my art, I didn’t do that. I could express feelings that didn't feel fit for any other kind of situation. It also had a psychological payoff in that it made me feel really good. I think it gave me the endorphins, serotonin, whatever release that felt really good. I identified it early on as a safe repository for that kind of energy. I started directing it towards that, and I was like, oh, this is good. I get praised for this. I get better at it over time. It allows me to continue doing other labor in my life. It was functional in a way that everything else that I did compulsively had really negative consequences really quickly. I didn't identify being an art monster as a self sacrifice. It was more like a survival mechanism. My writing practice is the only intense obsession and devotion I've had that has never threatened to kill me.” 

The Dry Season quotes Annie Dillard more than once, and Febos spoke the same quote again in our conversation, calling in the power of “yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.” She wrote that writing itself is an experience never as bad as living it, and I had questions about that. She had a great answer. 

“The thing about going through an experience and not being present for it is that you don't ever get to leave until you complete the process. For me, writing is a way of completing the process. What I think is better about writing about a hard experience, than living it, is that it's safe. I have the very thing I didn't often have in the experience, which is my agency. I get to direct the experience, I get to say when I start and when I stop, and I can stop anytime I want. I can bring in as much help as I need. I can take as long as I need. It can be quite painful, but it is not harming me.”

But still I think of the super ugly stuff. Of those experiences, she says, “There are some that were so fucking painful when I was living them, there's no way writing about them could ever even approach it.” Some of us know those things. The living that you just can't write. The living that always sits beyond reach of the word or the brush or the drum. The things even our genius artists, living or dead, can't bring to anyone else, hard as we might try.

In Julia Cameron’s The Artist's Way, which I listened to on a cassette player every morning for twenty minutes the first year I lived in New York, Cameron says jealousy tells you what you want. Another burn this book created for me was in just how smooth, compelling, and consumable Febos makes this book that was poking at tender places I didn't know I had. A friend reminded me, “A lot of people are jealous of Melissa Febos.” Lol. But actually, if I stayed there, I’d be missing the point. If I want to come, she’s calling us all in to the joy she’s found, and The Dry Season is a map to get there. 

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See Melissa Febos in conversation with Claire Dederer at Elliott Bay Books June 14, doors at 6:30 pm.