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.
Known in Spanish as La Monja Alférez, de Erouso was forced into a nunnery as a 4-year-old girl in 1589 but made her escape as a teenager. For the rest of her life, she traveled Europe in masculine guise, having thrilling adventures that included multiple imprisonments, romantic dalliances with women, military stints, and one alleged meeting with the Pope.
Born in 1397, the mystic Margery Kempe was already married and a mother when she began having visions of demons, devils, God, Jesus, Mary, and other biblical characters. She was known for preaching in public while violently sobbing and convulsing, for which she was frequently imprisoned and charged with heresy. Touted as the first autobiography written in the English language, her book describes her struggles for chastity and her many pilgrimages, including to meet the famous anchoress, Julian of Norwich.
In this experimental and erotic masterpiece, Glück creates a mash-up of his own obsessive love affair with a younger man and Margery Kempe’s obsessive love for Jesus. Along the way, he integrates some of his trademark New Narrative techniques, like borrowing lines solicited from his writer friends. A weird, moving, beautiful, extremely explicit romp like no other.
A mesmerizing and gorgeously written novelization of the life of 12th-century poet and abbess Marie de France. If you are hoping for transcendent depictions of divine visions, hot sex between nuns, an engrossing portrait of a community of women triumphing against all odds, and immaculate prose—this book is for you.
Dunant is a master of historical suspense, and in this much-beloved novel, she transports us to 16th-century Italy, where we follow young Serafina, who is sent to a convent by her father when he cannot afford her dowry. What follows is a propulsive 400 pages rich with political intrigue, Catholic Church drama, erotic longing, and conspiracy among nuns.
Brown’s exploration of the life of 17th-century Italian nun Benedetta Carlini not only covers the accusations against her of lesbianism and her subsequent trial, but also the fascinating historical context of Renaissance Italy. When I took my wife to see Paul Verhoeven’s adaptation, Benedetta, she left the theater at one point because the sex portrayed was so blasphemous—and she is an atheist. Need I say more?
The narrator of Wood’s Booker-finalist novel, driven by despair over her Sisyphean work in species conservation, abandons her marriage and life in Sydney to stay at a convent in New South Wales. There she finds the quiet industry of its nuns, a resurfaced childhood figure, and lots of mice. No narrative fireworks, but Wood’s prose makes the quiet reflection of her narrator truly riveting.
This self-help book by two scholarly BFFs is full of wisdom gleaned from the lives of 16th and 17th-century nuns like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Saint Teresa that is applicable to your most modern quandaries. The cheeky and insightful volume is also brimming with fascinating historical details, like the penchants of some nuns for side hustles and eating spiders.
The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex by Melissa Febos is out now.