My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

They had absolutely no sense of humor. When I’d first moved to the neighborhood, they’d been flirty, even annoyingly so. But once I’d begun shuffling in with eye boogers and scum at the corners of my mouth at odd hours, they quit trying to win my affection.

the "eye boogers and scum" did it for me

it was the opposite of suicide. My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to save my life.

She took it as a source of pride that she had a superior knowledge of pop culture during this period. She knew all the latest celebrity gossip, followed the newest fashion trends. I didn’t give a shit about that stuff.

Low-key based. Also, it's easy to see why, IF you don't care about this kind of stuff, you're bound to become depressed in a city like NYC or with life in late capitalism in general. Especially if you don't have any friends.

After a minute or two of silence, she looked up at me and put a finger under her nose—something she did when she was about to start crying. It was like an Adolf Hitler impression. I pulled my sweater over my head and grit my teeth and tried not to laugh while she sputtered and whined and tried to compose herself.

“I went to Columbia.” “That’s good for me to know, but not much use to you in your condition. Education is directly proportional to anxiety,

One of the few genuinely interesting theses this crackpot therapist throws into the room.

“The moment we start making generalizations, we give up our right to self-govern.

You could actually use this statement to counter 50% of all the (often very shallow) criticism towards this novel.

So I spent that summer at home upstate with my parents and had sex with a boy from high school, who was far more sensual and interested in how the clitoris “works,” but not quite patient enough to really interact with mine successfully.

I thought that if I did normal things—held down a job, for example—I could starve off the part of me that hated everything.

Common misconception.

If I had been a man, I may have turned to a life of crime. But I looked like an off-duty model. It was too easy to let things come easy and go nowhere. Trevor was right about my Achilles’ heel. Being pretty only kept me trapped in a world that valued looks above all else.

“You were blue when they cut me open and pulled you out. After all the hell I went through, the consequences, your father, and the baby goes and dies? Like dropping a pie on the floor as soon as you pull it out of the oven.”

That image, Jesus. (But very effective, I got to admit. As it is so often the case in this novel.)

I’d been stupid to believe that employment would add value to my life.

Common misconception no. 2

I plunged into sleep full force once this arrangement had been made. It was an exciting time in my life.

I love the juxtaposition of these two sentences.

On August 20, 2000, I turned twenty-seven in my apartment in a medicated haze, smoking stale menthols on the toilet and reading an old Architectural Digest. At some point I fumbled in my makeup drawer for eyeliner to circle things on the pages that I found appealing—the blank corners of rooms, the sharp glass crystals hanging from a chandelier. I heard my cell phone ring but I didn’t answer it. “Happy birthday,” Reva said in her message. “I love you.”

“Well, she’s dead,” I reminded her. Dr. Tuttle put her pen down and folded her hands into prayer. I thought she was going to sing a song, or do some incantation. I didn’t expect her to offer me any pity or sympathy. But instead, she squinched up her face, sneezed violently, turned to wipe her face with a huge bath towel lying on the floor by her desk chair, and scribbled on her pad some more.

Every scene with Dr. Tuttle is just delightful to read. You never know what to expect from the next sentence.

“She mixed alcohol with sedatives,” I said. I was too lethargic to lie. And if Dr. Tuttle had forgotten that I’d told her my mother had slit her wrists, telling her the truth wouldn’t matter in the long run. “People like your mother,” Dr. Tuttle replied, shaking her head, “give psychotropic medication a bad reputation.”

Ruthless, Dr. Tuttle! But a very American way of looking at things.

The photos men sent of their genitals were all banal, semierect, nonthreatening. “Your turn,” they’d write. Usually I changed the subject. “What’s your favorite movie?”

“My mom died,” Reva said during a commercial break. “Shit,” I said. What else could I have said? I pulled the blanket across our laps. “Thanks,” Reva said again, crying softly this time.

Shit.

I was trapped. The day would be hell. I would suffer. I felt I might not survive. I needed a dark, quiet room, my videos, my bed, my pills. I hadn’t been this far from home in many months. I was frightened.

“Chicken, spaghetti, some kind of ratatouille thing,” she said, lifting each of the lids. She was oddly unembarrassed. It seemed like she had dispensed with her usual uppity pretentions. She made no attempt to excuse herself for being homey, folksy, or whatever the word she would have used to describe living in a home like hers—“unglamorous.” Maybe she had just completely shut down. She opened the refrigerator to show me shelves of round Tupperware containers of steamed vegetables that she’d made in advance, she said,

"completely shut down" – Ironic of the protagonist to say that (with her hibernation project and stuff). But it makes perfect sense from her twisted perspective.

Reva opened a door into a narrow, pink-tiled bathroom. The toilet tank was running. “It’s always like that,” she said, jiggling the handle to no effect.

I love the many details like this in this novel, which makes all its scenery consistently trashy.

the professor, a woman with long waxy hair and crude silver jewelry, asked me how much I’d paid for my shoes. They were black suede stiletto boots, and they’d cost almost five hundred dollars, one of many purchases I’d made to mitigate the pain of having lost my parents, or whatever it was I was feeling. I could remember all of this, each sniveling, pouty face in that classroom. One idiot said I was “broken by the male gaze.”

took another shower, downed the last of my Ambien, and found the porn channel again. I turned the volume down low, shifted my body away from the screen so that the grunts and moans could lull me. Still, I didn’t sleep. Life could go on forever like this, I thought. Life would, if I didn’t take action. I fingered myself on the sofa under the blanket, came twice, then turned the TV off.

Next logical next step after only being able to fall asleep with the TV on/podcasts/audiobooks/etc.

I had to admit that it was a comfort to have Reva there. She was just as good as a VCR, I thought. The cadence of her speech was as familiar and predictable as the audio from any movie I’d watched a hundred times. That’s why I’d held on to her this long, I thought as I lay there, not listening.

Everything about her seemed troublingly pornographic—her matte foundation, her darkly outlined lips, that perfume, the poised stillness of her hands. “Innovative solutions.” “Anatomy of workplace violence.” “Strong objectives.” She wore her hair in a loose chignon, my tiny pearl earrings budding from her earlobes like drops of milk, simultaneously perverse and innocent, I thought. She also wore my white eyelet blouse and a pair of jeans I’d given her. I felt no longing or nostalgia for the clothes.

It's like the protagonist gave her depressed attitude towards capitalist life to Reva, along with her clothes. Like the protagonist is now free from that burden after having been cleansed through her hibernation and by living a less materialistic life. Pretty unrealistic, of course, but realism is not this novel's point anyway.