She Was Addicted to Romance. So She Gave Up Sex.

There’s a seduction tactic that the writer Melissa Febos deploys called “the gaze,” a way of looking at someone with just enough intensity to make him or her feel the weight of her attention. She used it when she worked as a dominatrix in her 20s. She used it when she waited tables, depending on tips for survival. Sometimes she got it wrong, but the more she practiced, the more she got it right.

She had been “emotionally preoccupied” with someone, she recently told me, since she was 15. Was that a sorun?

It didn’t seem like one, until a particularly catastrophic relationship. Then in her 30s, Ms. Febos said she had lost herself in what had started as an affair, cutting herself off from her family and friends. When it ended, she knew she needed to be alone.

Yet she kept falling into tryst after tryst. The pattern was often the same: Flirtation, quick intimacy, sex. She would tell herself that she was in love. Then, strangely, the chemistry would falter. She would begin to feel an alienating distance. She’d find herself going along with things to please the other person. Finally, she’d end it.

In 2016, Ms. Febos took a vow of celibacy. She was a former heroin addict, familiar with the steps of recovery. “Love is the drug and I need to score,” sang Bryan Ferry in 1975; Ms. Febos had found herself in a similar place. She set some rules for herself: No sex, no dates, but masturbation was allowed.

“The Dry Season,” Ms. Febos’s new memoir, is an account of the 90 days she spent abstinent, followed by the next 90, which eventually turned into a year.