Authors on Tap: Melissa Febos and Jessica Hopper

Please join us in person on Tuesday, June 3rd at 7:00pm central to help celebrate Melissa Febos' new memoir, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex. Melissa will be in conversation with Jessica Hopper!

About The Dry Season:
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 authors:
Melissa Febos is the national 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.

Jessica Hopper is a director, producer, and author based in Chicago. Most recently, Hopper directed and executive produced the four-part docuseries Women Who Rock, released in the summer of 2022. She has written for GQ, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Elle, and Bookforum. Her first book, The Girls Guide To Rocking (Workman, 2009) was named a Notable Book for Young Readers by the American Library Association. She is the author of The First Collection of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic, published in a revised and expanded second edition in 2021, and the 2018 music memoir Night Moves. She was formerly the Editorial Director at MTV News, and Senior Editor at Pitchfork and Rookie. Her essays have appeared in Best Music Writing for 2004, 2005, 2007, 2010, and 2011. She is series editor of The American Music Series at the University of Texas Press. In 2019, Hopper served as host and executive producer for KCRW’s popular music history podcast, Lost Notes. In 2021, she co-founded Golden Teapot, a production company specializing in music and culture documentary work, with her sister, former Rookie publisher Lauren Redding. Hopper’s forthcoming book, No God But Herself: How Women Changed Music in 1975, is due from MCD/Farrar Straus & Giroux in 2025.

About this event:
This is a free, in person event and registration is required. Please click on the registration link below. Melissa and Jessica will be happy to sign and personalize copies of their books after the event! Can't make it to the event? Signed copies will be available after the event and we ship nationally.

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