"'Why am I reading this' were the first lines of my latest memoir. I sat in my small apartment hearing the beautiful sounds of morning..."

"... and realized that as the sounds faded I had become stuck, almost against my will, in someone's head as began the torturous recounting of her sex life, legs firm, my mouth tight, I firmly withdrew myself from the dark spaces I was then inhabiting, back into the light. No thank you, NY Times, not this time. And coffee in hand, I went about my day, proud I had not succumbed yet again."

Writes MDH, a commenter over at the NYT Magazine, spoofing an essay that that I didn't read either. 

The essay, by Melissa Febos, is "What I Learned Trying to Spend a Year Celibate/Giving up sex was both harder and more rewarding than I could have imagined," which is adapted from her book, "The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex" — to be published by Knopf.

How can you spoof — or recognize a spoof of — something that you haven't read? If one person can write about the sex she hasn't had, another can write about the essay she hasn't read.

But can you believe going an entire year without sex? I don't know if she made it, but we're told she tried, and we can see that she extracted an entire book, apparently full of descriptions of her pleasure, out of this ordeal.

Note: The topic of the distinction between "celibacy" and "chastity" has already been addressed on this blog, back in 2010, here. Why do edited publications use "celibacy" for "chastity"? I think "celibacy" feels spiritual/philosophical and "chastity" sounds prudish. I don't know who they're trying to impress.