A year of sleep and two coffees please
A young woman’s attempt at renewal through rest and relaxation.
If there ever was a year that most of us would have opted to have slept through, it would have been 2020.
Ottessa Moshfegh’s “A Year of Rest and Relaxation”, however, is set in New York’s Upper East Side in 2000. Our protagonist is a nameless twenty-six year old, blonde, pretty (she’ll ensure you remember this), stuck in the sticky and unnavigable throes of wanting life and not wanting to live.
The story follows this young women’s attempt at creating a new life for herself — a restart or a redo, if you will — by taking a year to rest and relax. She tries to achieve this via complex cocktails of sedatives prescribed to her by Dr. Tuttle, a manic and helpless psychiatrist who herself appears to be incapable of stringing together coherent thoughts as though they too are perhaps swimming through her mind, shaken and stirred together with the sample drugs stuffed in her desk drawer.
To want a do-over of various moments of our lives is nothing novel. In popular fiction, we might vicariously achieve this by stepping into a teleportation device or Quantum Leap-ing into back to such moments of our lives with full knowledge of the eventual outcome and a chance to do it better. Our protagonist isn’t in a fantastical land nor has access to time tunnels. Set in a time where beauty standards were that of thin and blonde and “mental wellbeing” was not used in common parlance, our protagonist resorts to a form of self-abuse by lulling her body into an unconscious state for days on end, in the hope that after the year is up, she will be all right again — that she will want to live again.
“I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was the dream” — A Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh.
Her monotonous days are interrupted by her daily trips to the Bodega (two coffees always and perhaps an occasional piece of confectionery) as well as infrequent visits from her best friend whom she despises — Reva. Moshfegh’s use of irony with our protagonist’s disdain at Reva’s bulimia is all too painful, creating a sense of helplessness; a helplessness only felt by those on the outside looking in; a helplessness felt by both the protagonist and Reva towards each other; a helplessness exacerbated by the fact that both are unable to see themselves in each other.
The impacts of childhood and parenting are heavy explored throughout the novel. Our protagonist exudes a sense of detachment from her parents, as if she was simply a visitor passing by in this paradoxical household of professor, drunken beauty and housekeeper. And yet, our protagonist shows a want for the past, for familiarity, for “the stiff blankness of my mother’s eggshell sheets”. Moshfegh was perhaps emphasising how we are all tempted at times with the desire to retreat back to familiar, known places and patterns, regardless of whether or not they feel unsatisfactory — the act of retreating and coming back becomes itself a kind of safe haven.
I appreciated Moshfegh’s continual revere of Whoopi Goldberg throughout the protagonist’s inner monologue. “Just the thought of Whoopi soothed me. She really was my hero”. The protagonist’s habitual watching and re-watching the actress’s films and TV shows on her VCR highlights the calmness of routine, the craving we all have for safety which is more often than not rooted in familiarity. It also draws attention to the gaping hole left in our protagonist formed as a result of a lack of her mother’s love and, more largely point to our want as humans to simply want other humans — a feeling felt deeply and desperately by the majority of us in the year that was 2020.
A raw and often-times all-too relatable look at a desperate want to renew, reboot and re-emerge, this novel softly but insistently cries out that “Pain is not the only touchstone for growth”.
What did you take away from “A Year of Rest and Relaxation”? What were your feelings towards the protagonist?
