Source: Penguin Random House The narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation might want to consider finding a new psychiatrist. When she first speaks with Dr. Tuttle (over the phone at 11:00 pm on a Tuesday while Tuttle is washing dishes), the psychiatrist tells her “The biggest threats to brains nowadays are all the microwave ovens” and asks the narrator if she works for the FBI, the DEA, or the FDA before she will consent to an appointment.
The narrator is seeking a psychiatrist because she needs help sleeping. Not to get the recommended 7-9 hours a night, but to go into hibernation. As she explains it, “I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me...I was plagued with misery, anxiety, a wish to escape the prison of my mind and body.”
Outwardly she appears to be holding it together: she is beautiful, lives in a gorgeous apartment in New York City, and works at a hip, mildly transgressive art gallery. She doesn’t seem to be suffering from a DSM 5 mental illness but rather from a sort of existential anguish. She lost both of her parents, neither of whom seemed to care for her much, and is at the end of a long, drawn out sort-of relationship that mostly involved her much older boyfriend using her for sex between other partners. She has one friend, Reva, whom she barely tolerates, and they both use each other in their own way.
So she chooses sleep. The list of pills she takes includes pretty much every psychiatric medication (and then some). When she continues to report issues with sleep to Dr. Tuttle in order to continue receiving her medication, Tuttle gives her a new experimental drug, Infermiterol (an invention of Moshfegh’s), that causes her to experience multi-day blackouts. She tries to piece together her actions upon awakening from the Infermiterol-induced haze each time and eventually hatches a safety plan with the help of a hack artist.
Taken as a psychological novel, Moshfegh’s narrator has some serious issues going on that merit sustained therapy. Since this is a novel by one of contemporary fiction’s most compelling and odd voices, however, that doesn’t happen. Rather, the narrator’s hibernation seems to work; it functions as a sort of hard reset that frees the narrator to reshape her life according to her own expectations rather than those of others. The novel ends on September 11, 2001, which casts a long shadow over the preceding pages. Reva dies in the Twin Towers, and the narrator becomes fixated by the image of a falling woman broadcast repeatedly on television: “There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.”
THE BASICS