Fall is always my favorite time to dive into a new book; there’s something about classes starting and the changing of leaves that makes me want to sit for hours in a library. I recently read My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, an American novelist who is known for writing novels about women in isolation.
Every time someone has asked me about my most recent read, I have much too enthusiastically thrown myself into a long-winded summary and analysis of My Year of Rest and Relaxation. However, it never quite came out right—for some reason I could never articulate the entity and soul of this novel the way that I have wanted to. I’ve been thinking about why this book is so hard for me to talk about, to wrap my head around what the point of it is.
This novel centers around a skinny, model-esque, beautiful and young twenty-something girl. She goes to Colombia, enjoys a hefty inheritance from her dead parents, and works at an art museum. Yet, she lives a miserable life, and decides that she will medicate herself into a year-long hibernation.
Reading her accounts of downing melatonin, avian and lithium like it was her dinner felt like witnessing a destructive episode first-hand. It was a horror movie that I couldn’t for the life of me look away from. Moshfegh famously writes “repulsive” characters, but in this novel she wanted the reader to be able to hate the narrator without her appearance being a main focal point.
Moshfegh has expressed frustration about this, saying, “They wanted me to somehow explain to them how I had the audacity to write a disgusting female character . . . It shocked me how much people wanted to talk about that”. In many ways her new novel was written in response to this, to prove that beauty, wealth, and privilege can be just as repulsive.
If you read any book this month, I would highly persuade you to read this one. It will challenge your comfort levels and make you question so many things such as your own happiness and sleeping habits. Moshfegh did it once again with this novel, because it will tear you apart with every page.