I am truly amazed by how much I loved Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I feel I could just as easily have hated it, or been bored with it, or irritated by it. Perhaps it was a matter of timing - I read it at the right time, at a receptive moment. I know that the book was extremely successful, but I know little else, and haven’t yet read any reviews - I want to put together my thoughts on it before I do. But first, a little about what motivated me to read it in the first place.
After I finished writing Amourette, about a month ago now, I happened to listen to an episode of Literary Friction in which Carrie and Octavia discuss the trope of the ‘sad girl novel’. I wondered if I’d accidentally written one. I asked my sister what she thought. She asked me whether anyone refers to Yanagihara’s notoriously bleak A Little Life as a ‘sad boy novel’. This question makes a pretty good point, I think. Culturally, we dismiss and disregard women’s pain. The mere existence of the term ‘sad girl’ does this work pretty neatly.
It did its work on me very effectively. I quietly panicked for a while after learning of the term. It took me three years to write Amourette, and I very much struggled to read novels during this time. Listening to the episode, and reading the various articles that have been written about the ‘sad girl’, I felt like I was waking up in a world in which saying you liked Fleabag is embarrassing, and messy and chaotic women are just not that interesting any more. Perhaps my novel will be unsellable. Nobody cares about this kind of story.
But as the panic began to tire itself out, I found myself able to observe it at a bit of a distance, to see the work it was doing, the work the ‘sad girl’ term itself was doing. It wasn’t just dismissing my writing - it was dismissing my experiences, too, and I’ve learned lately not to stand for that. I watched Fleabag for the first time with my sister and it was the ‘flash poo in Pret’ scene that made me fall in love with it - we were both in hysterics over that depiction of the sister relationship. Years later, I realised that Fleabag had actually done something pretty significant for my personal life, by simply showing the power of putting things into words, rather than hiding them in shame. And here’s the thing - it’s not just the big things, the power of #MeToo, for example, but the small things, the tiny details of human life. Because sometimes you don’t know how big they are till you say them out loud, till you see other people reacting to them. They might stay small but move out of shame and into humour, like when I compared notes with a dear friend on the colour your poo goes when you take iron supplements. But they might be the doorway into a self-knowledge that enables you to free yourself from, for example, a destructive relationship. Shame is a powerful inheritance: telling honest stories about women’s lives disrupts it. Dismissing these as ‘sad girl’ lit only gives it strength.
I put my anxiety down for a nap and did my research, and decided to start with the book that always gets mentioned in discussions and dissections of this trope: My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I was drawn in initially by the humour - the close observations of Dr Tuttle are so addictively horrifying, and the narrator’s wealth, beauty, and cruel indifference to her friend Reva make her shockingly, hilariously unlikeable. And the drugs! As someone who’s been treated by psychiatrists on both sides of the Atlantic I was immediately struck with a kind of grim nostalgia for all those American brand-name psych meds - in the UK we tend to refer to the generic drug name, even if we get a brand name from the pharmacy. My Year is an overstuffed medicine cabinet of drugs I mostly recognised as real.
Mostly. Infermiterol is an invention of the novel. “If those don’t put you down for the count, I’ll complain directly to the manufacturer,” says Dr Tuttle. And when our narrator starts taking it, she loses significant periods of time, carrying out actions she doesn’t remember. It turns out that those unremembered actions are connected with Ping Xi, the artist she knows from the gallery job she lost who taxidermies dead dogs. I felt that Ping Xi was an ironic stand-in for the author, when the sleeping experiment begins in earnest. The Infermiterol had already got me feeling that we were heading towards some kind of speculative element; the narrator’s total surrender to Ping Xi weirdly reminded me of how amazed I was when I read Sophie’s World as a teenager and learned who was sending Hilde the postcards. That was an early moment for me of literary and philosophical excitement, and I hadn’t experienced anything quite like it until finishing My Year.
Ping Xi is explicitly forbidden from interacting with the narrator during her experiment - just as the author cannot interact with her characters. To do so would be to cross a line between realities that should be impenetrable. But when the sleep is over, it seems that this prohibition has been lifted. The narrator goes to the Met in early September and, in a beautiful scene of artist-muse reconciliation, she imagines that the frames are two-way mirrors, and wonders if the artists could have painted more ‘generously’, and at one point reaches for a painting and touches its ‘dry, rumbling surface’. Her future begins to feel unknowable. It’s a moment of glorious freedom.
But the September in question is September 2001. My Year is a period piece, published in 2018 but taking place in a pre-9/11 New York City. The narrator’s dying VHS player chugs along in the background; dates are mentioned pretty sparsely, but they grow more frequent as September 11, 2001 draws closer. Trevor and Reva are both manoeuvered into the path of the attacks, their WTC jobs established as we grow more aware of the timeline. Part of the suspense of the book comes from wondering what will happen when September comes. Given the hints of the fantastical in the novel, I even wondered whether we were in the same universe in which the attacks occurred. Having a narrator detached from reality on a collision course with an enormous and devastating event creates a great deal of dramatic tension.
But there’s more than that. For a book that’s so sharp, ironic, and resolutely unsentimental, we do get some sense of the innocence of pre-9/11 America. Occasional flashes of the narrator as a child, of Reva as a child, are juxtaposed with the constant reminders of innocent animals, of the dogs Ping Xi kills, of the foxes and beavers slaughtered to make fur coats, of the lap dogs being walked around the freezing avenues of the Upper East Side, of the squirrels being hand-fed bodega cornflakes each morning. And amidst these things the narrator seems innocent, too: utterly determined and decisive and intelligent in a way, and yet so very cruel, selfish, and ignorant, as well.
I’m left wondering how Moshfegh has done this impossible thing, has made me feel deep compassion for such a narrator. I think it might be something personal. I know how it feels to be taken over by a voice that is similarly determined and decisive and intelligent, driven to self-destruct, and yet completely detached from the feelings of others, from the professed love of others. It is incredibly powerful to see it depicted so clearly and, I think, compassionately. I imagine the beauty and privilege of this narrator will have drawn criticism from other readers, but I actually think the choice of such a woman is important. That scene in the museum made me liken the narrator to the subject of a painting. She has been selected by the writer as a (typically male) painter will select a muse. Beauty is the primary criterion, and it must be captured, with all that this word implies - to be confined, studied, depicted in an illusory stillness.
That stillness is a cushioning, like her money, her apartment, her doorman, her fur coat. Her drugs, her films on repeat. The pornography, its soporific moans; the snow of January. The knowledge of which the characters are innocent but the reader is not: they are in a safe space between January and September 2001, before the whole world changes. How safe is she, really? She considers, with detachment, that if Ping Xi abandons her she’d be quite happy to commit suicide. But it’s a problem to be deferred. The drugs and the sleep enable her to defer it. And the money. In Amourette, my protagonist is draining a legacy, too, but it’s a small one, and she plans to die when it’s gone. The legacy in My Year is large enough, it seems, to outlive the narrator. She operates outside the capitalist imperative to generate income in order to live, but that’s not what makes her free, in the end.
She’s free when the author releases her back into the stream of normal history, outside of the experimentation of the first-person novel. At least, that’s how it felt to me. And I think, in part, it’s because the experience of grief has given back her urge to live. I got the sense early on in this novel that the narrator’s vicious, detached voice might be a response to the grief she feels at the loss of both her parents. In a wildly lyrical and surreal passage towards the end of the novel, she takes her final Infermiterol and notices herself crying. Then she fades into a final sleep. And then, as planned, she wakes up in June, the experiment done. She’s alive.
This book hit me hard, in a good way, philosophically and intellectually and emotionally. I’ll be interested to revisit these initial thoughts after reading a few reviews and getting a sense of how it was received by critics. For now, I’m left thinking of something that occurred to me as I finished writing my first novel, as I made that agonising decision of where to end it. I felt, as a writer, that I wanted to do the right thing for my characters, to be a quiet witness and to sit with them until I felt they could manage on their own. I think Moshfegh was a bit more than a quiet witness in My Year, but I felt a similar sense of care here, even as a devastating historical event drew the novel to a close. For now, I can’t explain it any better than that.
