February 18, 2026

Photo: Beowulf Sheehan

Today, Melissa Febos published her latest memoir, in which she details the year of her 30s that she spent abstaining from romance and sex (with other people, that is). While the Cut’s reviewer was annoyed that Febos found this mission too easy, the Washington Post praised her knack for “pairing structural rigor with emotional disclosure.” Speaking of disclosure, I know Melissa and we’re friends. Which is why it was comfortable for us to have a chat about, e.g., masturbation. 

Do you have a response to people who grasp the premise of the book but are sort of like, Wait a minute, I can't get laid. I really can’t relate to this woman’s problem. You have a scene that addresses this directly in the book, where you're having lunch with your friend who is really hard up and hasn't had sex in a long time, and she says, "Fuck you, Melissa."

I mean, that was the very first thought I had immediately following the realization that I had a book's worth of things to say about the experience. I was like, Wait, everyone's going to laugh at me. Maybe that's always the first thought a memoirist has when they realize I have another memoir to write. And so I walked into the experience of writing the book wanting to be very conscious of that and fully willing to accept that it might be a fatal flaw.

But I also knew that during my year of abstinence, I had talked about what I was doing with a wide variety of people, and we found almost instantly that — after they finished laughing at me or telling me to fuck off and got a little bit more information — we had way more in common than we’d thought. We were both people with problems of extremity and people with a fraught relationship to aloneness or to coupledom. The analogy that always occurs to me, because I'm in recovery from disordered eating, is that bulimics and anorexics are in the same category of problems. 

I don’t think I know many women who have a completely healthy relationship with sex, dating, and intimacy.

I mean, how do you have a healthy relationship with your body in a culture that objectifies, hates, fetishizes, and has tried to control bodies that appear like yours for centuries? To the extent that we become capable of it, I think it's pretty miraculous. And I think we have just as deranged and unhealthy a cultural relationship to love and sex as we do to women's bodies. It feels like magic that I've managed to recover from that definition of love and sex as much as I have.

I don't know if you're comfortable talking about this, but I have to ask you if you explored Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous? 

I am in multiple forms of recovery and have a lot of 12-step recovery in other areas. So one of the questions that I carried into this experience was, Am I a sex and love addict? And particularly, Am I a love addict? I privately hoped that I was because I have had a really successful experience of recovery from addiction to other things. I wanted my problem to be one that had a really known solution and a community that I could just plug myself into. I truly identified with some aspects of it, but other aspects of it I didn't. It just isn't that simple for me.

I have had specific relationships that were definitely addictive, but broadly construed, it wasn't true over my whole history of love. I think a lot of my experiences reflected the ways that I'd been conditioned and socialized. What is a subjective problem? What is a cultural problem? Does it matter if you discern between them? Those questions were all the work of the book.

When you were making the rules for yourself, how did you go about setting those guidelines?

Well, by trial and error mostly, which was a little bit painful, and definitely humbling, and also pretty revelatory. I started with sex because that just seemed like the most obvious common denominator across all my relationships. And then I flirted with someone and was like, Oh, no, that is the problem. The exciting brain chemicals that just got released that I now want more of, that's the thing that I need to divest from. And so early on I was like, Okay, no flirting, no sexually charged friendships, none of that. I really need to not be preoccupied or engaged or chasing that feeling at all.

I considered refraining from masturbation as part of my celibacy. But it became clear to me pretty quickly that, actually, my autoerotic relationship was the healthiest sexual relationship I'd ever had. And, in fact, I wanted to bring a little bit more of those vibes into my interpersonal sexual relationships. In my autoerotic life, I related to myself with total unself-consciousness and acceptance and tenderness, yet it was really hard for me to access any of that when I was with other people because I was so focused on them. 

I should probably masturbate more. I should put it in my Google calendar or something.

I do it to procrastinate a lot honestly. When I have a deadline, I'm like, Well, maybe I'll just watch some porn first. And I never feel bad about it afterwards. I don't ever judge myself for my fantasies. I never think about what I look like. It just feels like a pure, sensual, physical experience that I don't locate within a value system. And that is actually so refreshing to realize.

Who would you recommend a year of celibacy to?

I'm super-wary of prescription when it comes to other people's experience. But for me, every experience I've ever had of any kind of dependency was predicated on the illusion that I needed something or that I would feel deprived without it. And that story was always a lie. And so I guess the only prescription I would make is that if a person has a relationship to something that feels dependent and causes them pain, there might be a really surprising amount of freedom on the other side of setting it down. And it's okay to start small. A day is the perfect unit of abstinence for me because that usually feels manageable. I started with three months. 

But I have a long secret list in my head of people who I think should experiment with celibacy, but I can't share that with you or anyone. I mean, you know who, don't you? Of your friends and loved ones? 

Because of my job, I immediately thought of celebrities.

Oh God, I don't want to get in trouble. But I mean all of them. I feel like there are so many of them that are just like, Ugh, let's try another one. Ugh, that didn't work. Let's try another one. Let's try another one. And anyone who sort of seems to be shuttling through relationships, they might need to become the right person before they find the right person.

Should we send this book to Taylor Swift? 

I mean, I'm not going to say that I pictured her face in my mind when you asked me that question, but yes, I did.

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It’s summertime, when everything and everyone gets a little messier. So I thought I’d ask: What’s the grossest experience you’ve ever had in NYC involving someone else’s bodily fluids getting on you in public? My own low point (over the course of 24 years) is relatively mild: a woman across the subway aisle from me, with very little warning, projected her breakfast all the way onto the tips of my sneakers. How about you? We look forward to collecting and publishing your most appalling answers. 

Illustration: Olivier Heiligers

Tom Scocca had come to rely on his Oura ring to tell him how well he was sleeping, but then he consulted a bunch of sleep specialists who told him, basically, to stress out less about the ring’s findings. One of the sleep specialists he consulted — Dr. Daniel Barone, the associate medical director of the Center for Sleep Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine — said it was especially important to take the ring’s “sleep quality” data with “a grain of salt.” “Barone said he’s more interested in a patient’s subjective experience upon waking than in what happens when they’re actually asleep,” Tom writes. “So if they say, you know, ‘I wake up, I feel fine, but geez, my Oura ring says I don’t get deep sleep,’ I would say, ‘Take the Oura Ring and throw it away.’”  

The major takeaway, for Tom (and, I’d wager, for most of us) is that we might not be getting the recommended seven-to-eight hours of sleep, even if we’re spending seven-to-eight hours in bed. That’s because even if our “sleep efficiency” is high, we’re still awake 10 percent of the time. Unfortunately, we can only solve this problem by going to bed earlier and, sorry, no, I would simply rather watch TV until 10:30, read until I pass out, then feel horrible most of the time, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop me. 

Photo: Jamie Lee Taete

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