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What to make of this thing we flailingly, failingly call love? These conversations attend to the ways we come together and come apart to ask what it means to love—well and badly; romantically, platonically; greedily, freely, and carelessly; unconditionally or conditions required—as writers explore the questions most fundamental to love’s labors and spoils, its alchemy and its chaos. Edited by Lucy McKeon.

What is love? How is it best sought, fallen into, lived? What do we express through love, and what of lust? Longing? Who are we in love, and how does love make us? Why do we lose the ones we love, and how do we come to find we've lost ourselves?

What to make of this thing we flailingly, failingly call love? 

 attends to the ways we come together and come apart to ask what it means to love—well and badly; romantically, platonically; greedily, freely, and carelessly; unconditionally or conditions required—exploring the questions most fundamental to love’s labors and spoils, its alchemy and chaos.

At the age of 35, the writer Melissa Febos decided to give up sex. Her abstinence would include romantic and erotic entanglements of all kinds—no sex, no dating, no flirting. “At first I minimized the stakes of my celibacy, of changing myself, because it made it easier to step toward that challenge,” she writes in 

, published this week by Knopf. “I did not want to admit that my life might not be worth living if I did not change.”

Temptations present themselves. Stakes are raised. Masturbation is considered. Describing her year of celibacy with characteristic self-scrutiny and a delicious wit also found in (but less central to) her other works, Febos consults the experience of others, interweaving the stories of celibates past—mystic nuns and radical feminists, cult leaders and the celibate-adjacent—with her own. She makes an inventory of all her relationships, and studies her patterns with the diligence and dedication of someone desperate to change.

Writers and artists also fill her pages, those Febos once admired for their passion and promiscuity (Edna St. Vincent Millay, Colette) and those whose wisdom buoys her metamorphosis (Audre Lorde on the erotic, Sappho on eros). From Febos (barely) resisting the urge to flirt at the airport, to lush descriptions of the “unbeingness” of orgasm and artistic creation alike, all amid the company of Octavia Butler, Simone Weil, Agnes Martin, Sara Ahmed, May Sarton, Sophie Fontanel, Nan Goldin, and many others, 

Celibacy opens Febos to an era of solitude as transformative as any great love affair, alive with its own sensuality and thick with discovery. “I had been thinking of this time as a dry season,” she writes, “but it had been the most fertile of my life since childhood. I had run dry when I spent that vitality in worship of lovers. In celibacy, I felt more 

Lucy McKeon

To start, why don’t you tell me about your decision to “take a break,” as your mom put it.

Melissa Febos

I had an uneasiness about my romantic pattern for some years. I was in consistent, consecutive monogamous romantic relationships from the age of 15 until I was 35. By my early 30s, I definitely had multiple people, especially my mother, saying, “you should maybe take a break and spend some time alone.” At that point I was annoyed in that very particular way that comes with recognizing a correct note from someone who knows you. And I think my uneasiness deepened when I didn’t—which I guess meant that I couldn’t—take a break. I just kept ending up in relationships.

Then, when I was 34, I had a really, really painful breakup that was the end of a really, really painful relationship, and it felt like a bottom of some kind. And at that point I was so uncomfortable and my life had been so adversely affected by that relationship that I had no ability or will left to deny it. I got serious about taking a break.

, your book about that painful relationship and attendant themes, that I think speaks to the experience of such a bottom: “Stop fighting. Grace is not sweet and mercy is not getting what you want.”

Absolutely. I think every bottom is full of grace, right? Because what makes a bottom a bottom is that we start moving in a different direction from that point, which is the greatest mercy, the only meaningful mercy when you’re caught in a destructive pattern. But it is also the nadir of comfort. It’s the least comfortable point and it is the amount of discomfort necessary to induce change. I’ve spent a lot of time at the bottom, so I know.

I think one of the book’s most powerful revelations is your coming to see that the same force that can become the compulsive need to be desired—a crude shorthand for what leads you to finally take that break—that this same drive can be channeled toward making art, toward writing. That it can speak to a longing for a connection to some higher power, or a oneness. I was interested in how celibacy becomes not something you’re denying yourself, but more a way of opening yourself.

It was only before I started that I conceived of celibacy as a form of deprivation. And it was a really profound misunderstanding of the experience. Pretty soon, I thought, Oh, this is like all the other abstinence I have ever experienced, in which I’m moving from a relationship to something that I believe I’m dependent on and that I believe offers me relief or gives me access to something, whether it’s a part of myself or a particular feeling. But where there is a compulsive or addictive attachment to something, there’s always a lie at the center of it, right? Because dependency is not world growing or perspective growing. It inevitably shrinks one’s world and one’s perspective. It’s limiting.

I’m a very devotional person. I am pretty inclined to worship and have an active spiritual sense, and that can combine with my addictive nature in pretty destructive ways where I can fall into a pattern of worship of a not-right object, and it can turn into a form of dependency. It happens for me with food and people and exercise and drugs and alcohol, it kind of doesn’t matter, I can do it with a song. But then as soon as I stop—in all of those cases, and certainly with my celibacy—as soon as the sort of glamor of that dependency falls away, I can see everything I’ve been missing.

It’s the least comfortable point and it is the amount of discomfort necessary to induce change. I’ve spent a lot of time at the bottom, so I know.

It makes me think of the return to your body you write about so evocatively in your collection 

, which describes many different kinds of returns to yourself through the process of understanding the forces that shaped your young life. I’m thinking especially of your essay “Wild America” and the physicality of getting back to your body as a source of strength and pleasure and aliveness, really an experience of the sublime.

Totally. I think love and all of the states of excitement and attachment that we call love are definitely a pretty reliable source of that sublime or ecstatic feeling. But I got into trouble when I started to narrow the aperture through which I looked for sources to specific people. Being hyper-focused on anything means that you miss so much, and sublimity is everywhere. Even as a kid, I was already finding ways to limit it by looking at achievement or attention or beauty or whatever. Our culture, capitalism, is really good at giving us material goals, and our brains are really good at giving us rewards for pleasing others.

? How did you decide to include all the research you did into historical celibacy—be it the thirteenth-century beguine nuns or the radical feminists of the 1970s—and how did you understand its relation to your own story?

, I thought it fit into the constellation of those essays. But within days of writing, I had 40 pages, and I was like, this is not going to fit here. Nor did the style, it just felt like a very different thing. So I thought, okay, this has a loud pulse, I’m going to repot it over here [like a plant] and I will come back to it.

When I was celibate in my mid-30s, I did a lot of research. I first started reading about the beguines and Hildegard von Bingen, the radical feminists and Father Divine, and a lot of the medieval folks. And so I had done a lot of that reading, but without any objective. I was just interested in keeping busy and looking. I was contemplating how I wanted to change. Taking a break, just pausing my behavior, was not going to be enough. I knew I needed to replace my behavior with different behavior, and in order to do that, I needed to scrutinize my belief system and probably change my beliefs. And so I was looking for models.

, I hit other kinds of bottoms, the global pandemic happened, I moved to Iowa. I wrote a craft book. I didn’t really come back to [the beginnings of 

] until late 2022 or early 2023. It felt unlikely that it would be a book, because I’d never written a book about being happy before. I thought, this will be boring. There’s not enough here. I thought it would be a global history of voluntary female celibacy and queer celibacy, through which I would sort of lace my own story. Then as soon as I started writing it, I saw my whole romantic history actually had plenty of conflict. I didn’t plan to write a memoir and it was a surprise when I ended up doing so.

That’s so interesting, because of your reputation and skill for writing the self, and also because 

, the craft book you mention—which is itself genre-expansive, memoiristic and essayistic and pedagogic, and a defense of personal writing against tired, often misogynistic, conventional wisdom—explores the creative intelligence beneath our intellectual knowledge about whatever we’re writing or thinking about. You describe the process of recovery—of memory, emotion—even the (fashionable to disparage) healing that can come of writing one’s life. What did you recover in writing 

I generally do believe that I have some very deep intelligences. We all do, but almost none of that appears on the surface of my personality. What I call my personality is just the scummy surface of my intelligence—mostly ego and post-traumatic instinct and avoidance. It can be fun! But it’s this self-conscious, very repetitive, very fear-oriented, very ego-oriented, scatterbrained, candy-eating, super avoidant, addictive top layer of me.

I know, because the writing is not written by that part of me. The person you’re talking to now is mostly that. If you could see me running around my house in my giant sneakers, eating weird high protein snacks and listening endlessly to audiobooks, it’s a very different vibe.

A huge part of my work as a sentient human is trying to sink down and access those deeper parts of me, and create fissures in that top layer so that intelligence can direct my thinking and actions and how I proceed through the world as much as possible—and it’s still a very, very small amount that I succeed. Every area of my life is organized in order to attempt to do that: teaching, writing, meditating, the work I do with my body, the work I do in my marriage, the work I do in my relationships with other people is all trying to get down there.

Writing is just the perfect tool because I do it in total privacy. No one else is watching, there’s no one else to please or to push against. It is possible to really forget myself when I’m writing. And that’s important I think, to get away from the story I’m telling myself—and the work of a memoirist, I think, is in many ways about shearing away that story, the story that we’re telling ourselves in order to live, so that we can get to something that’s a bit truer.

Didion was brilliant and brutal in this herself—the shearing.

The unconscious process of living other people’s preferences without even realizing it: horrifying, relatable.

 was about taking the story of myself and love and being like, okay, here I am standing in the wreckage of my life after my 50th breakup, awash with shame and confusion about how I got there. Here’s the story that I tell myself about who I am, which is that I’ve done all this work in therapy, I’m a romantic, I love love, I do so much to accommodate others, I’m a really good partner. And these things don’t really add up. It seems like if that story is true, that I would be getting better at this in ways that I don't seem to be getting better. I actually seem to be getting worse. And so I thought, there’s a problem here.

I knew from being a sober person that abstinence and stock-taking are how I get insight, that I have to look at what’s been happening in a really honest and thorough way. So that’s what I decided to do during my celibacy. I took an inventory of every single entanglement, crush, relationship, one night stand. I just was like, what happened here?

And the patterns emerged pretty quickly. And there was a different story. Alongside that work, I was subtracting something that took up an enormous amount of space in my life, so much of my attention and energy went into love and romance and falling in love and breaking up and all of that. When I took it out, there was so much more space.

There was no one else around to try to syncopate my attitudes and preferences and behaviors to. I really was able to observe and get curious about who I was without a partner. And there was a lot of new information there. Aspects of myself that I hadn’t known rose to the surface. All of this was very surprising to me because as a person who had been a queer feminist my whole life, had been through decades of therapy and exhaustively examined all of my relationships, I thought I had a lot of insight. I was not a person who was just, like, bopping along. It was very surprising to me, how much I didn’t actually know about myself.

The sexiest thing about celibacy: getting to know yourself. The unconscious process of living other people’s preferences without even realizing it: horrifying, relatable.

Social conditioning is not conscious, it’s not agented. It masquerades as choice, but it’s actually something we’ve been trained to believe. It really takes detective work, very concentrated attention, to look at a behavior and follow it to a thought, and then to follow the thought back to what our real belief is and to see if they match.

I was touched for instance to read that, left to your own devices, you liked to eat plates of nuts, apples, and cheeses for dinner at, like, 11pm. It makes me think of an 

 with Toni Morrison where she talks about how, after she stopped working as an editor at Random House and started writing full-time, she began to learn what she liked—when she naturally liked to wake up, what she liked to eat, what her rituals and preferences were, around writing but also just living.

Yes, there was a kind of bliss to it. I don’t think I had ever been like, What do I actually like? What do I like now, at the age of 35, without imagining what someone else wants? I went through the same process when I got sober where I was like, Wait, do I really like punk music? Do I really like the writing of Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs, or did I just need examples of alcoholics who managed to write books while they were still using?

Because when my life is organized around one pursuit, it’s like the Annie Dillard essay, right? An essay that I often teach [and reference in the book] that has this line, “yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of the single necessity,” and for a long time, for me, that was drugs and alcohol. And then for a long time, maybe an even longer time, it was the pursuit of love and sex. And so many other things, other interests, other passions, other preferences, kind of bowed to that single necessity so that it could take up most of the space in my life. And when I took it away, so much became visible to me.

Okay, let’s get into it. At a certain point you have to decide whether or not you’re allowed to masturbate. How did you approach the question?

I went to this group meeting, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous—SLAA—because it was a pretty central question early on. I truly didn’t know, Am I a sex and love addict? I think I was sort of hoping that I would decide that I was, and I could just join another 12-step program because they’ve worked so well for me. But that didn’t turn out to be the case. I did have a lot of overlap with what I heard there. But this is one of those kinds of sobriety where people have to define their own abstinence, it’s different for different people, and for a lot of the people in that space, they had a compulsive relationship to masturbation, or it was part of a network of behaviors they saw as their addiction.

I was not addicted to masturbation. In fact, it provided an occasion for me to reflect on my sexual relationship to myself and it was immediately clear to me that it was quite different from my sexual relationships with other people, that it did not feel vexed in the same way—the substantial complicating element of performance wasn’t a part of it at all. It really was just what felt good, and I didn’t have a lot of shame, I wasn’t trying to please anyone but me. I feel fortunate for that.

I understood that I would be a better partner to other people if I knew more about how to relate to myself in relationships and how to stay connected with what I really wanted and what I needed and what pleased me.

Social conditioning is not conscious, it’s not agented. It masquerades as choice, but it’s actually something we’ve been trained to believe.

Would you say something about the distinction, which you emphasize in the book, between gaining clarity and the actual process of changing your life?

The thing I think to say is just that it never ends. Because I am a person of such extreme instincts and habits, I get myself into tight places really quickly. My survival, my literal survival, has necessitated that I organize my life around mediating those impulses and the things that mediate those impulses are accessing those deeper, more abiding forms of presence and intelligence, having a spiritual life, connecting with nature, slowing down, seeking intimacy with other people.

Falling Hard