The writer Melissa Febos draws from the raw materials of her life — including her work as a dominatrix, struggles with addiction, and relationship with her mother. In her fourth book, Body Work: The ...

This is Rough Draft, in which our favorite writers get to the bottom of their own craft. From preferred writing drinks to whether or not you really need to carry a notebook, we find out all the ways ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. After jumping from one relationship to the next, Melissa Febos found herself in bed with a woman she scarcely knew. "Though I ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Talking about sex is still taboo. Talking about not having sex? Maybe even more so. Melissa Febos didn't go into her year of ...

“Every kind of social movement has begun with people sharing their common experience,” says Melissa Febos on a Wednesday afternoon in January, her face glowing on the computer screen. She is Zooming ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Melissa Febos tried to tell this story before. The author of four (soon to be five) published memoirs, Febos had written an essay ...

In her fifth book, The Dry Season, Melissa Febos trades sex for sovereignty, reframing celibacy as a radical act of self-ownership. Her new memoir chronicles her year of “withholding” in the wake of ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. "You can't change a culture if you can't name the things that need to change," says Melissa Febos. The author dives into that ...

I expected this review to write itself in a headlong rush, the way I read “The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex.” But like abstinence, the lessons of Melissa Febos’s latest book ...

Most girls hold a specific kind of memory: the memory of a moment they realized their body, as Melissa Febos writes in her memoir-in-essays Girlhood, had made a "violent turn." For me, it happened one ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. 'Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World' by Catalina De Erauso Known in Spanish as La Monja Alférez, de ...