A Year Without Sex

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In 2016, Melissa Febos was waiting for her plane to land in London when she saw her sitting four rows ahead: the hot airplane stranger. “My seduction sonar locked on to her,” she writes in her highly anticipated memoir The Dry Season. Febos rolls up her shirtsleeves to tease some forearm tattoo and dangles a hand with “short unvarnished nails” into the aisle. Months ago, this kind of overture would almost certainly end up in sex. But this time, Febos ...