My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Soon I was hitting the pills hard and sleeping all day and all night with two- and three-hour breaks in between. This was good, I thought. I was finally doing something that really mattered. Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart – this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then – that when I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.

I really enjoyed Ottessa Moshfegh's Man Booker Prize-nominated novel Eileen – enjoyed the black humour and gross-out weirdness – and as I was reading her latest, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, I was finding it hard to imagine that both books came from the same author; the tone and voice are just so different. Until, that is, I realised that both novels are about mentally unstable women – and while the character Eileen was overtly bizarre in a way that made me laugh uncomfortably, the unnamed narrator of this book is young and rich and beautiful; self-obsessed in a way that makes you want to shake her by the shoulders and say, “Get a hold on yourself.” She has First World Problems; has benefited from White Privilege; has won the Genetic Lottery; has realised the American Dream. What has she got to be upset about? But then you realise that she's also clinically depressed, possibly suicidal; has no supportive relationships; has become involved with an unstable, unscrupulous, and prescription-happy psychiatrist. What has she got to be happy about? Eileen made me squirm and giggle uncomfortably, but My Year of Rest made me squirm with the uncomfortable recognition of my own inability to recognise mental illness when it's presented in such a pretty package; and there's value in that. It took me a while to get into Moshfegh's headspace with this one, but with the repetition of the pills and blackouts – and the touching ending that I had anticipated; the ending that correlates the narrator's experience to a type of historical malaise and wake-up call – I eventually got her point, and it's rather brilliant. (Caveat: I was fortunate to read an Advanced Reader's Copy and quotes – as long as they are – may not be in their final forms.)

Sleeping, waking, it all collided into one gray, monotonous plane ride through the clouds. I didn't talk to myself in my head. There wasn't much to say. This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: 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.

The narrator tells us immediately that, as an heiress, she has enough money to prepay the rent and bills on her Upper East Side apartment for a year and put into practice her plan to drug herself into oblivion for that time. She has one friend, Reva, who refuses to stop dropping in on her despite the narrator being unkind to her, and a sometimes boyfriend, Trevor, who she only seems to call when she's blacked out. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Tuttle, doesn't mind phone appointments so long as she gets her full fee, and the only other people the narrator interacts with is her doorman and the Egyptians who run the bodega where she goes for coffee and snacks in between naps. It doesn't take long to realise that “heiress” means “orphan”, and as she recalls events from her home life, we learn that this was never a happy family. Reva might seem to be offering love and concern, but she's actually shallow and jealous and looking for a sounding board for her own troubles. Trevor is cold and abusive, the psychiatrist is a loon, and the narrator's casual acquaintances don't care enough about her to intervene: this beautiful and rich, mentally unstable young woman is all alone in New York City; not one person will step in to stop her from hurting herself.

I buckled down to the kitchen floor and splayed out on the cold tile. I was going to sleep now, I hoped. I tried to surrender. But I would not sleep. My body refused. My heart shuddered. My breath caught. Maybe now is the moment, I thought: I could drop dead right now. Or now. Now. But my heart kept up its dull bang bang, thudding against my chest like Reva banging on my door. I gasped. I breathed. I'm here, I thought. I'm awake. I thought I heard something, a scratching sound at the door. Then an echo. Then an echo of that echo. I sat up. A rush of cold air hit my neck. “Kshhhh,” the air said. It was the sound of blood rushing to my brain. My vision cleared. I went back to the sofa.

It's a common enough occurrence for a reader to root for a protagonist's stated quest, no matter how oddball the premise is. And I was rooting for this year of rest: wondering why Reva couldn't take the hint and stop interrupting the narrator's sleep; feeling her desperation as the usual cocktail of pills stopped doing their magic. At about the same time as I realised how unhealthy my rooting was, the book reintroduces another character – a semi-talented installation artist named Ping Xi – and his obvious exploitation of the narrator's illness for the sake of his art shone a light back on me as the reader: I was guilty of the exact same thing; treating this mentally ill character as an archetype, a muse, instead of a (metaphorically) flesh and blood person. Moshfegh challenged my concept of mental illness with this book, and although I didn't find the writing to be especially enchanting or inventive (as it was in Eileen), the entirety of the narrative (plus that ending) was just what the doctor ordered.