The Dry Season

What is The Dry Season about?

I began my first romantic relationship when I was an adolescent and then romance, love, and sex preoccupied me for the next twenty years. In the aftermath of a devastating breakup, I had a moment of reckoning and faced the fact that I needed to change. Even after many years of therapy, I was stuck in a pattern that had bottomed out in a really ugly way. I felt depressed and anxious, and I wanted to make different choices in love—to learn how to hold onto myself.

I decided to spend three months celibate, abstinent from every behavior I associated with romantic love. I knew it would sound ridiculous to some people, but for me it was a profound shift. I began a rigorous review of all my past behavior related to love and sex. At the end of those three months, I was shocked to find that I was enjoying myself. I was also daunted by how much more there was to learn. Three months became six, and six became a year. It’s not an overstatement to say that it was the happiest year of my life up to that point. It was also one of the most sensual and erotic times I’d ever experienced—erotic in a deep and spiritual sense. I fell in love with my independence. At the end of that year, I had developed a new outlook on love, deepened every other passion in my life, and transformed my relationship to myself.

How did you pinpoint sex as the thing to focus on?



I started with sex, because that seemed to be at the center of my problem. However, it quickly became clear that sex was actually peripheral to the emotional and psychological hold that romance and attraction held for me, the manner in which I compromised myself for the perceived desires of other people. I did not have a compulsive relationship to sex, it was the emotional binds that came with it that had so much power over me, and which
I wanted to change. So, the concepts of celibacy and abstinence became terms that I defined specifically for myself: the absence of all romantic pursuit of other people. For instance, I could pleasure myself, but I could not flirt.

Why do you say this year was one of the most sensual and erotic?

I had always directed my erotic energy (and I mean this in a capacious sense, not only sexual, but passionate, attentive, sensual) toward lovers and the pursuits of love and sex, all the attendant thrills of seduction. By removing that focus, I found the rest of my life infused with a new vitality. I felt more in touch with my own body, its pleasures and preferences, than ever before. I enjoyed food more! I felt better in touch with nature, with every setting that I inhabited, because I was more awake to them. I experienced a deepening of my spiritual sense and my political passions. I became more intimately connected in my friendships, and that is storied in this book: how I came to see my closest friendships as the great loves of my life.

To whom do you imagine this book speaking to?

Anyone who wants to change their patterns in romantic relationships. Anyone who wants to wake up and make more conscious choices. In love, yes, but also in any other realm of their lives. I was unhappy with the way I was living but didn’t know how to change. Taking dedicated time and undergoing specific work during that year taught me how possible change is at any age, in any area of one’s life.

So much of how we live and how we love is dictated by factors that we did not choose: our personal history, social structures, scripts that were given to us before we knew to question them, our intergenerational inheritances. In order to recoup our agency we have to first become aware of those influences, heal from their damage, envision new ideals, and work to live within them. It is hard work! We need to find new role models, as I did that year. I hope this book offers proof that it’s possible for folks who want to make that kind of change, and demonstrates that it’s actually joyful work. The Dry Season isn’t a grim or overly serious book—I had a lot of fun writing it, and living it. I think it’ll make people laugh and give them some new ways of thinking about personal change.

Your past books explore sexuality from multiple viewpoints—as a former sex worker, a queer woman, in adolescence—and this seems like a dramatic pivot. Would you say the book promotes celibacy, or is anti-sex?

The book promotes love and sex as conscious practices, which we choose with our whole hearts and minds. It promotes the idea that a joyful, erotic, full life need not include or be defined by romantic partnership or sex. I have no prescriptions for the specificities of anyone’s sex or love life. I merely had an experience that changed my life and all my future relationships for the better and I wanted to share it.

In the past, my actions in romantic and sexual relationships were often driven by dependency, ego, an urge to please, fear of conflict, and unrealistic romantic ideals. I had a lot of sex that I felt ambivalent about. I called all of that “love” but it was unsustainable and left me feeling warped and exhausted. It siphoned energy away from my other passions. It caused me to act in ways that felt contrary to my true self. My old definition of love was about being swept away by big feelings, losing control, controlling others, and sourcing my self-esteem in other people. Now, it has a lot more to do with conscious care, emotional intimacy, and differentiation. I didn’t think those could be sexy! I was so wrong.

Some would say that being in too many romantic relationships is a nice problem to have—what about people who are celibate not by choice but circumstance?

I often asked myself this question as I was writing. It was one of the reasons it was important to me that the book had a sense of humor and humility about itself. Superficially, to folks who struggle with a deprivation of romantic love in their life, having too many lovers may seem like an appealing problem. But anyone who has ever struggled with obsession knows that the object of one’s obsession is not the real issue. Too little romance and too much romance are ultimately the same problem: one of fixation and lack of balance. Both types have a vexed relationship to aloneness.

At its deepest level, this is not a book about sex or loving others. It is about the deep satisfaction and liberation of cultivating an intimate relationship with oneself. It
is about the spiritual nature of solitude, independence, and honesty. I believe
that it offers something to anyone who is interested in those freedoms, regardless of the role that romantic love has played in their life.

You write a lot about addiction in this book. Do you consider yourself a sex and/or love addict? Do you consider your relationship to love and sex to be pathological?

I write a lot about addiction and recovery all the time, because these experiences have defined so much of my life. I’ve been clean and sober for twenty years now and was ten years clean and sober during the events of The Dry Season. One of the questions that drove my celibacy was: does my behavior in sex and love fit into the rubric of addiction? Ultimately, I determined that it did not, though I had sometimes acted compulsively in those areas.

I don’t give a lot of credence to pathological explanations of individual behavior because we all live in a sick society. I see our society’s relationship to love and sex as deeply perverse. That is, riddled with shame, polluted by commerce, and infused with the same longstanding prejudices and power structures that undergird every other part of our society. Despite this, I believe it is possible to forge a healthy, flourishing, satisfying relationship to sex and love. But, as a queer woman with addictive tendencies, how was I to separate my own troubling patterns from those of my country, when every pop song on the radio is describing the same sort of romantic obsession? It was a real pickle.

It’s actually a relief in some ways to suffer from a clear-cut addiction. It’s much harder to change a behavior that lies in that gray area: painful, but not “pathological.” It’s hard to change our imbalanced relationship to an essential part of life when that imbalance is part of our national culture. This is true of so many things, among them compulsions for sex, love, food, work, and money. How do we relate to something that is full of spiritual and emotional value, like love, but which we have used in a more superficial, extractive way? How do we learn to work to support our families without letting it steal us away from them? How do we learn to use food to nourish our bodies instead of punishing or numbing ourselves with it? After writing this book, I believe all of those changes are possible.

There are a lot of other figures introduced in this book—from Hildegard von Bingen to Colette, the Shakers, Agnes Martin, Octavia Butler, Sappho, and tens of others—how did they fit into your personal story?

I had always worshiped figures who loved as I did: frequently, passionately, messily, painfully. When I decided that I wanted to change how I related to sex and love, I quickly realized that I needed some new role models. So, I started reading about voluntarily celibate women throughout history, and became captivated with a number of them. I also spent some time scrutinizing my former heroes, to see what magic they’d held for me. I knew that I’d been living into a particular lineage of women artists who saw love as a consuming pastime, and I wanted to belong to another lineage: that of women who valued other kinds of love with the same passion, who embodied love in more spiritual and political ways. These figures made their way into the book in a very organic way, as they guided my own thinking. In a way, writing this book was drawing a picture of my newly extended family tree.

You’re married now. How does your relationship fit into these ideas of independence, the erotics of solitude, etc.?


At the end of my celibacy, I really thought I might stay happily alone forever! And then I met my now-wife. We are taught that marriage is the happy end of the story, but I’ve found it to be the beginning of an even more interesting story. Our relationship is one of the greatest gifts of my life and long-term love is one of the greatest challenges I’ve ever faced. I would never have been equipped to navigate it without the experience I describe in The Dry Season.

For me, the magical ingredient in love has been sustaining my relationship to aloneness. I mean that in a literal sense: taking time apart from each other, but also in a metaphorical sense: by maintaining my integrity as a separate person, by honoring my truths, even when they conflict with hers. Our marriage is not based in need or oneness; we choose to live alongside each other, day after day, with clear eyes. My ability to love this way is a gift of the year I spent alone.