The Booksmith is thrilled to be welcoming Melissa Febos to The Booksmith for The Dry Season on Tuesday, June 17th at 7pm. She will be joined in-conversation by writer Carvell Wallace. Please join us!

RSVP is not required, but appreciated. Seats are limited and can be guaranteed with the purchase of a book.

About the book

From Melissa Febos, the national bestselling author of Girlhood, comes an examination of the solitude, freedoms, and feminist heroes she discovered during a year of celibacy and a wise and transformative look at relationships and self-knowledge.

In the wake of a catastrophic two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break: For three months she would abstain from dating, relationships, and sex. Her friends were amused. Did she really think three months was a long time? But to Febos, it was. Ever since her teens, she had been in one relationship after another. As she puts it, she could trace a “daisy chain of romances” from her adolescence to her midthirties. Finally, she would carve out time to focus on herself and examine the patterns that had produced her midlife disaster. Over those first few months, she gleaned insights into her past and awoke to the joys of being single. She decided to extend her celibacy, not knowing it would become the most fulfilling and sensual year of her life. No longer defined by her romantic pursuits, she learned to relish the delights of solitude, the thrill of living on her own terms, the distinct pleasures unmediated by lovers, and the freedom to pursue her ideals without distraction or guilt. Bringing her own experiences into conversation with those of women throughout history—from eleventh-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen, Virginia Woolf, and Octavia Butler to the Shakers and Sappho—Febos situates her story within a newfound lineage of role models who unapologetically pursued their ambitions and ideals.

By abstaining from all forms of romantic entanglement, Febos began to see her life and her self-worth in a radical, new way. Her year of divestment transformed her relationships with friends and peers, her spirituality, her creative practice, and, most of all, her relationship to herself. Blending intimate personal narrative and incisive cultural criticism, The Dry Season tells a story that’s as much about celibacy as its inverse: pleasure, desire, fulfillment. Infused with fearless honesty and keen intellect, it’s the memoir of a woman learning to live at the center of her own story, and a much-needed catalyst for a new conversation around sex and love.

About the author

Melissa Febos is the nationally bestselling author of four books, including Girlhood—which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. She has been awarded prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, LAMBDA Literary, the National Endowment for the Arts, the British Library, the Black Mountain Institute, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Best American Essays, Vogue, The Sewanee Review, New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Febos is a full professor at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly.

Carvell Wallace is a writer and podcaster whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, GQ, New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and others. His memoir, Another Word For Love was a 2024 Kirkus Finalist in Nonfiction. He’s been nominated for Peabody Award in Journalism, a National Magazine Award and was a 2023 winner of the Mosaic Prize in Journalism. His 2018 book The Sixth Man spent 13 weeks as a New York Times bestseller and made Barack Obama’s year end list. He lives in Oakland, California. 

About the bookstore

The Booksmith is an independent bookstore located in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco since 1976.

Please note:

• Check-in for the event will begin at 6:45pm.
• Priced ticket holders (Book+seat, Pay it Forward!+seat) will have seats held until 7pm. Arrivals after 7pm will be allowed admission, but seats are not guaranteed.
• General admission ticket holders will be offered seats at check-in on a first-come, first-served basis. May be standing room.
• Space at the door on the day of the event is usually available, but not guaranteed.
• Books will be for sale on the night of the event.
• ADA accessible. Bathrooms on site during event hours.
• Events typically end between 8:30 and 9pm.
• Questions? tickets@booksmith.com