8 Divinely Erotic Books to Kick Off Your Hot Nun Summer

With her new memoir, 'The Dry Season,' out now, author Melissa Febos shares the surprisingly sexy books she read during her year of intentional celibacy.

a headshot of author melissa febos opposite the cover of her memoir the dry season
(Image credit: Beowolf Sheehan / The Knopf Doubleday Group)

When you're looking to get lost in a book, sometimes you need your reading material to match your mood. With Marie Claire's series "Buy the Book," we do the heavy lifting for you. We're offering curated, highly specific recommendations for whatever you're looking for—whether you're in your feels or hooked on a subgenre trending on #BookTok.

In this author-curated rendition, Melissa Febos, the bestselling author of Girlhood, shares the surprisingly sexy books about nuns she read in the year she committed to celibacy—the inspiration for her new memoir, The Dry Season. See her recommendations below.


In my mid-30s, I spent a year intentionally celibate. To my great surprise, it was one of the most sensual years of my life. This startling fact sparked a curiosity: Had this often been the experience of voluntary celibates? I went looking for answers and ended up reading a whole lot about nuns. For centuries, abbeys have offered women an escape hatch: instead of participating in the heterosexual economies of their times, reproducing and devoting (a substantial part of) their lives to caring for a small number of others, women can pledge themselves to God and opt out. Sometimes, this means serving the poor in their communities, worshipping, and living chastely. Other times, it means fleeing the abbey in drag and leading a life as a swashbuckling soldier, murdering any man who insults you. Other times, it means faking your stigmata and seducing other nuns. My research that year yielded a whole new cast of role models. From the first autobiography ever written in English to an experimental erotic novel of the New Narrative movement, here are eight books to kick off your hot nun summer.


The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex by Melissa Febos is out now.

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Melissa Febos is the nationally bestselling author of five books, including the new memoir The Dry Season and 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.