“My Year of Rest and Relaxation” by Ottessa Moshfegh: The Harsh Realities of a Privileged Girl Facing an Existential Crisis
Week #7: reading a book by a female author every week of 2024
“Each time I see the woman leap off the Seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower — one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake — I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it’s her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I’ll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.”
“My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” a novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, plunges readers into the life of a young woman in pre-9/11 New York, attempting to approach her existence with a peculiar strategy: prolonged sleep. The protagonist, despite her beauty, wealth, and privilege, is clinically depressed. She chooses a year-long hibernation from her privileged life, hoping to emerge as a better, not-bored-of-her-life version of herself. Ironically, while she desperately tries to escape the boredom of everyday life, she numbs any sort of strong emotion with medication. In the end, Moshfegh suggests that it was all along a journey of discovering whether true escape from pain is possible and what it means to be “alright” and “alive” in a seemingly uncontrollable world.
The unnamed protagonist chooses medication as her go-to method of numbing herself to sleep. As the book progresses, she loses the ability to perform simple tasks — she becomes lazy and uninterested. As she tries to find color in her life through the mind’s ‘cleansing’ power of sleep, she seemingly fails to do so, at least while she still has to wake up and listen to her bulimic friend Reva’s chattering about material things. The protagonist, of course, being not like other girls obsessed with consumer goods, blames her inability to be emotionally invested in anything because of her deteriorating health condition on Reva’s vanity. Another source of the protagonist’s disillusionment with life is her parents. She is obviously grieving their loss, even though their relationship was never something she could think of fondly.
Every time she tries to find a place where she belonged (as if she even tried to do that) or a person who would make her feel needed and wanted, she is faced with rejection, as she becomes a background character in the life of everyone she knows. Her father was an absent professor who ignored her for most of his life; her mother was a drunk who used “Valium” to keep her obedient as a child.
Later, seemingly accepting the fate of being emotionally abused and abandoned, she starts seeking relationships that only reinforced her position as a non-person — a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is why the only romantic relationship she’s ever had was with an older man, Trevor, to whom the peak of their relationship was forcing her to have casual oral sex while she was drugged-out and asleep (obviously, this sounds like rape). The main character, being independently rich and beautiful, instead of abandoning him, starts obsessing over him since he gives her exactly what she always received from the people around her.
The vicious cycle doesn’t close on Trevor, as her chatty friend Reva is a sort-of distorted version of her own mother. Both of them have mental health issues and a drinking problem. However, most importantly, both of them are incredibly self-obsessed — a character trait the protagonist seems to be particularly drawn to.
Tired of this mundane existence, filled with apathy and utter rejection by everyone in her life, the main character chooses to start afresh in the only way that seems possible to her — by sleeping, A LOT.
“The deep sleep I would soon enter required a completely blank canvas if I was to emerge from it renewed.”
Existence seems to have exhausted her to the point where she prefers the absence of any stimulus or any feeling or emotion as being more appealing than the life she leads. In fact, she views her life’s engagements as distractions from the potential peace offered by nonexistence.
Every time Reva would invite her to a party to meet other people, she would be opposed to the idea unless she was under the influence of “Infermiterol,” a medical drug that seemed to enable her alter-ego of an outgoing young girl (maybe it was a subliminal message from her subconsciousness to stop “wasting her life away”).
“I’d never been to the kind of party in the Polaroid photos, but I’d seen it from afar: young and beautiful and fascinating people hailing cabs and flicking cigarettes, cocaine, mascara, the diamond grit of a night out on the town, random sex a simple gesture in a bathroom stall, wading once onto the dance floor then back out again, screaming drink orders at the bar, everyone pushing toward the ecstasy of the dream of tomorrow, where they’d have more fun, feel more beautiful, be surrounded by more interesting people.”
Even at her job, which she chose despite hating it and receiving very dismal pay for it, it is precisely there that her desire to run away from her negatives starts, and she even feels relieved that even this engagement came to an end when she got fired. Finally, she could enjoy uninterrupted nothingness sponsored by an impressive cocktail of medical pills.
“There was no sadness or nostalgia, only disgust that I’d wasted so much time on unnecessary labor when I could have been sleeping and feeling nothing.”
Personally, I was sure her body wouldn’t handle so much abuse, that she’ll make it through her “year of rest and relaxation.” But weirdly enough, it is precisely by committing to a life of intoxication by taking “Infermiterol” in scary high doses for over four months that she achieves this rebirth she was dreaming of.
Moshfegh seems to suggest that by taking drugs in uncontrollable amounts to escape from one’s problems is a pathway to finally seeing the beauty of the world in the simple things, seeing beyond the “capitalist way of endless consumerism.” While I’m sure that this is not the only way to achieve this effect, I was happy to know that she finally found what she was looking for (also it meant that the book was nearing its end).
“I breathed and walked and sat on a bench and watched a bee circle the heads of a flock of passing teenagers. There was majesty and grace in the pace of the swaying branches of the willows. There was kindness. Pain is not the only touchstone for growth, I said to myself. My sleep had worked. I was soft and calm and felt things. This was good. This was my life now. I could survive without the house. I understood that it would soon be someone else’s store of memories, and that was beautiful. I could move on.”
In the end, the protagonist finally starts seeing things for what they are, not the constructs people made her believe they represent — free from the burden of her past self, emotionless and apathetic.
“The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn’t exist yet. I was making it, standing there, breathing, fixing the air around my body with stillness, trying to capture something — a thought, I guess — as though such a thing were possible, as though I believed in the delusion described in those paintings — that time could be contained, held captive. I didn’t know what was true. So I did not step back. Instead, I put my hand out. I touched the frame of the painting. And then I placed my whole palm on the dry, rumbling surface of the canvas, simply to prove to myself that there was no God stalking my soul. Time was not immemorial. Things were just things. ‘Ma’am!’ the guard yelled, and then there were hands gripping my shoulders, pulling me to the side. But that was all that happened.”
In the ending scene, the main character sees her friend leaping from a burning building on 9/11 and comments by saying that she was finally alive when she was facing her death, while also achieving a rebirth of her soul by using heavy medication that must’ve seriously affected her physical answer. It seems as if death was the answer to life all along.
It took me a while to read this book. Mostly, because of how boring the descriptions got sometimes, that I was more invested in going down rabbit holes on different people and fashion brands this book referenced than actually reading it. This read was, well, tough. Next week, I’ll tackle another BookTok favorite — “Boy Parts” by Eliza Clark.
As always, thank you for reading, and I’ll catch you next time!
