994. Melissa Febos
Otherppl with Brad Listi
Brad Listi
4.8 • 554 Ratings
🗓️ 5 October 2025
⏱️ 83 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, where is it? |
| 0:01.3 | All right, everybody. |
| 0:08.6 | Welcome to The Other People Show, a weekly podcast featuring in-depth conversations with today's leading writers. |
| 0:16.1 | It is a books and culture show. |
| 0:18.8 | Happy Sunday. |
| 0:19.8 | I am Brad Listy, and I'm here in Los Angeles. |
| 0:22.7 | I appreciate you being here. |
| 0:24.5 | Don't forget to hit the subscribe button wherever you listen. |
| 0:27.5 | You can also subscribe on YouTube, and you can follow me on Instagram and Blue Sky. |
| 0:35.7 | So today I'm very pleased to welcome Melissa Fibos back on to the program for, I believe, |
| 0:43.0 | a fifth time. I think I've talked with Melissa for every single one of her books. She was the guest |
| 0:49.3 | in episode two of this podcast. So we have traveled this road together and it's almost a thousand episodes now. |
| 0:58.0 | And here she is again, celebrating the publication of a new book called The Dry Season, a memoir of pleasure in a year without sex. |
| 1:09.4 | It is available now from Knopf. It actually published earlier this year |
| 1:13.1 | to great acclaim. And the dry season is an examination of what it means to undertake a period of |
| 1:22.5 | self-imposed celibacy, the solitude, the freedoms, the unexpected pleasures. It's also a book that |
| 1:32.3 | weaves into the narrative, social and cultural history, and there's some great writing about |
| 1:38.7 | feminist heroes of Yore, who also explored this path. |
| 1:49.1 | And ultimately it's a very spiritual book with a lot of heart and wisdom in it. |
| 2:05.4 | When it comes to issues of self-understanding and relationships and the ways in which we relate to others and relate to ourselves as we navigate life and we navigate intimacy. So just another wonderful conversation with Melissa Fibos and you're going to hear |
| 2:12.9 | the two of us in just a moment. Today's episode is brought to you by Echo Books, publisher of a new story collection |
| 2:23.9 | from Jonathan Lethem called A Different Kind of Tension, New and Selected Stories. |
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