May Narrative Medicine Rounds with Melissa Febos

For our final Rounds of the season, we are deeply honored to welcome award-winning author Melissa Febos. Febos is the author of five books, including the national bestselling essay collection, Girlhood, which has been translated into ten languages and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Her craft book, Body Work (2022), was also a national bestseller and an LA Times Bestseller. Her most recent memoir, The Dry Season, was published by Alfred. A. Knopf in June 2025.

In The Dry Season, Febos examines solitude, freedoms, and feminist heroes discovered during a year of celibacy. In the wake of a catastrophic two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break—for three months she would abstain from dating, from 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 mid-thirties. 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 sensual 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 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.

The recipient of fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts, the British Library, MacDowell, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Black Mountain Institute, LAMBDA Literary, the American Library in Paris, and others, Febos's work has appeared in publications including The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Best American Essays, The Best American Food and Travel Writing, Granta, The Believer, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Elle, and Vogue.

She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is the Roy J. Carver Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program. She lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly.

Lilly Dancyger is the author of First Love: Essays on Friendship, a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, and Negative Space. Her next book, Muscle Memory, is forthcoming from Autofocus Books in 2027. Her work has been published by

The New York Times, The Atlantic, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Guernica, Literary Hub, and more, and she writes the newsletter The Word Cave. Dancyger lives in New York City, and teaches at the Randolph College low-residency MFA program.

Narrative Medicine Rounds are monthly rounds held on the first Wednesday of the month during the academic year, hosted by the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Rounds are supported by live captioning. If you have any other accessibility needs or concerns, please contact the Office of Disability Services at 212-854-2388 or disability@columbia.edu at least 10 days in advance of the event. We do our best to arrange accommodations received after this deadline but cannot guarantee them.