My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh

[Stacey]

I had mixed feelings about the unnamed narrator of this heavily morose story, a commentary on our world in the halcyon days during the year leading up to 9/11. She's clinically depressed, an ambivalent orphan who's mad at the world. (But once you read the backstory on her god-awful parents, being orphaned doesn't seem so bad.) It's the story of a woman living in New York City and la-di-da going about, yet resenting, the little consumer bubble life she finds herself living in. Reva, the one "friend" she's got she loathes and she's still in love with her gross, abusive ex-lover, Trevor. A gorgeous blond who says people compare her to Amber Valetta, our girl lands herself a quack shrink, feigning ongoing insomnia.

Dr. Tuttle prescribes her every sleep-inducing drug under the sun: Ambien, Trazodone, Silenor, Lunesta and the mother of them all, Infermiterol, which makes her go apeshit, doing weird stuff she can't remember while catching some much-needed days' long zzz's. Basically she sleepwalks to Rite Aid and the local Arab bodega for coffees and watches movies on her VCR -- she's especially taken with Whoopi Goldberg (and her vagina) and Harrison Ford. It's a creepy existence, one that the narrator elects for a year -- free of work and all encumbrances, replaced by pure rest and relaxation before supposedly beginning her real ife. What she's intending, we never really know. But then, of course, 9/11 happens and...

This book, chosen from the Winter 2018 group, was the perfect selection for Week 13: a book that is included on a New York Public Library Staff Picks list. No, it's not for everyone. It's about living on the edge in New York City ca. 2000 when everything seemed bright and shiny and phony, about human connection (and the lack thereof) before tragedy struck us all. I love a quirky story with unique characters who are sometimes sloppy and awkward and Moshfegh certainly delivers in that regard. This was one satisfying read.