B
Genre: Literary Fiction
I have to issue every warning ever for this book: suicidal ideation, abuse, death, suicide, toxic relationships, possible animal cruelty, sexual abuse, assault, addiction, animal death, extreme depression, the worst doctor in the history of ever.
…
I listened to the audiobook narration of My Year of Rest and Relaxation as part of some research I’m doing on storytelling techniques, and because Julia Whelan is a wonderful narrator, especially in first person perspectives.
This story is not one I could have read in text. But I think that listening to the book – which is told entirely in first person, present tense – helped mitigate some of the effects of the narrative that I am certain would have been damaging if not dangerous to my own mental tranquility. Instead of my voice, or my mental reading voice (I hear books as I read them – I know this may seem strange) I was hearing Julia Whelan’s voice, so I wasn’t as invested in creating and hearing the narrative as my own. It wasn’t my voice; it was someone else’s, and therefore the “I” and “my” and “me” and the first person location of the story was outside of myself, instead of being part of me for the period of time in which I read the story. That separation of voice was essential for me, because otherwise, this book could do a number on a reader. It is, no exaggeration, one of the most exquisitely messed up character narratives I have experienced.
The heroine, who is nameless, lives in Manhattan and is wealthy, beautiful, educated, intelligent, and in the worst mental space after her indifferent father dies and her abusive, neglectful mother commits suicide a few months later. The heroine is fired from her job in an art gallery, and realizes that she’s been sleeping for most of the day, minus her working hours. She decides that she wants to sleep for a year. So she figures out how to do so. She sets up her bills on autopay, and arranges her life so that her needs, which dwindle to an absolute minimum, can be met by visiting the bodega up the street, which is always accessible even after a massive snowfall. The book takes place in the fall of 2000 and the beginning of 2001, right up to September 11th, which begins to loom over the narrative in a way that adds pressure to an already tense story. A book about someone who wants to sleep for a year can indeed be tense, to my surprise, and that increasing stress of what would happen next to a sleepy, indifferent, caustic narrator made the book difficult to pause.
When the heroine is given a new medication by her incredibly malfeasant doctor, Dr. Tuttle, she learns that this drug causes her to black out for three days. She begins waking up in different places, such as on the LIRR heading out to her friend Reva’s mother’s funeral, which she had no intention of attending. She takes a pill, blacks out into a blissful, absent sleep, and wakes up to piece together what she did in the time which she can’t remember. And she does a lot of things, including visiting parties, shopping in thrift stores, and connecting with people she otherwise would loathe and avoid. Eventually, this medication and the total blackout it creates allows her to reach her goal: to sleep, uninterrupted but for the time she needs to resurface, hydrate, take another pill, and black out for three more days. With some assistance, she locks herself into her apartment and goes to sleep. This is a very cursory summary, as there are a million details in the minutiae of her attempts to pause her consciousness.
The narrator’s wealth, status, and location mean that for her, the most precious commodity is not time or happiness, because she has plenty of the former and can’t access any of the latter. Because she is thin, able-bodied, and beautiful, and she tells Dr. Tuttle she is having trouble sleeping, her needs are met directly. She isn’t going to be told she needs to lose weight to fix whatever health problem she has. She presents as outwardly perfect, adhering to every superficial external expectation of being an affluent White female in New York, so her doctor does not challenge her on her desire for sleep. (It helps that Dr. Tuttle is a complete quack, one with a valid license to prescribe anything and everything.)
She wants sleep. Sleep to be absent of her feelings, or, more specifically, her lack of feelings, and her fear about that lack that she’s trying so very hard to suppress. I read some reviews of this book that expressed degrees of loathing and hatred for the incredibly blithe, wealthy narrator who wants to check out of a life that is just so ineffably difficult what with not having to work and not having to worry about money. I can see why some readers reacted that way: she is indeed often loathsome, hateful, cruel, and indifferent. But I also had so much empathy for her, for how the pain and isolation of her upbringing and her young adulthood made her future look so bleak, empty, and utterly pointless. Instead of battling her pain, or even acknowledging it, she wants to sleep through it all, to check out of her life and erase her consciousness until she can begin again. She’s convinced that if she can sleep long enough, and hard enough, she’ll get a new start on her life. She doesn’t have any coping methods or individuals in her life that can help her. Effectively, she wants to hard reboot her entire body, brain, and existence. It is one of the most wrenching and yet terrifyingly familiar portrayals of depression I have read. She loathes everything, she hates everyone, she is as cruelly incisive to herself as she is to everyone around her, and she has no reason to leave her apartment, or even wake up. She has no responsibilities and no consequences for her actions, either. She just wants to sleep.
I can’t say I recommend this book to anyone who is depressed or has been, because this narration could be hideously upsetting in its familiarity. If I’d read it, and heard my own reading voice mentally telling me this story from the first-person, the horrible immediacy of the perspective would have been identical to some of the ways my brain sounded when I was depressed. Listening to a narrator, as I said, set up a distance that allowed me to listen but not fully immerse myself within the story. (And, just to be clear: this is most certainly not a romance.)
To be honest, I’m not sure how to grade this. The idea of answering the question, “Did you like this book?” seems impossible. My reaction is a glazed, “Uhhh. Sorta?” I’m glad I experienced it as I did, both for the limited engagement of it not being my voice, and for the outstanding performance of the narrator, which did hook into my emotions, my empathy, and my awe at the language, the writing, the construction of the narrative, and the journey of the character. It was an experience, listening to this book. Proceed with caution, please, but if you’re curious, it’s dark, it’s sardonic to the point of being pickled, and it’s a slow, cutting journey down a drugged serrated knife plot of, “Oh, honey. Oh, no.”
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Is there any redemption? Like does it have a happy ending???
I read Moshfegh’s EILEEN a few years ago. It was well-written, but I felt totally disconnected from the main character—which was perhaps Moshfegh’s point, but it didn’t make it any easier to feel sympathy, empathy, or understanding for Eileen and her impulsive decision-making process and terrible choices. I put Moshfegh in the “a good writer who excels at dislikeable characters” category.
I, too, “hear as I read”—but it’s for that reason I find it hard to listen to audiobooks. I’m always saying to myself, “That’s not how that’s supposed to sound.” But I can see that with difficult or disturbing subjects, an audiobook might be the best way to read something that you wouldn’t want to “hear” yourself saying/thinking.
This might be tl;dr but I have thoughts on this book…
Really interesting how Sarah said she couldn’t have read it in text – I couldn’t have listened to it as an audiobook. For me, I had to read it in text, and it says something considering how much my concentration has degraded in the last decade that I compulsively read this and didn’t get antsy once. I just had to keep reading.
The reason why Sarah needed it in audio makes a lot of sense though – for many people, the text could certainly be distressing to read in their own voice. But for me personally, I think the reading voice being my own was therapeutic. Not because I have drug addiction or a similar personality or background to the protagonist, but because I literally fantasise about sleeping my life away. Just putting life on autopilot – which she literally does via direct debits etc – and just lying there staring and sleeping until my head is totally empty. In fact, the level of my projection has just been brought home to me by the fact that Sarah has only now brought it to my attention that the protagonist is nameless to the reader.
I totally agree that September 11th looms over the book, but I think that’s an incredible achievement by the author considering it is barely mentioned and there’s not much direct foreshadowing. There’s one detail regarding another character which is mentioned in passing early on but which lodges in your mind, and I think that sets the dread in motion.
I love an unlikeable protagonist, but the experience can be infuriating and unenjoyable if the author doesn’t fully commit to them being one. Well, the author in this book fully commits. I understand the loathing people have for her, a beautiful, white woman who is privileged enough to be able to afford giving in completely to her depression in a way most people suffering with it cannot. I loathed her at times too. But depression doesn’t discriminate and this book is a great examination of how it can destroy you if given the means to do so. And she certainly has the means. Her privilege, which I can never aspire to, meant that, in many ways, this book was a fantasy for me, whatever that might say about me.
I also loved the economy of language. There is no real examination of her emotions, just an acknowledgement of them. No apologies, no guilt, even when she really should feel guilt. I think it’s the only time I’ve ever read a female character like that who I still felt empathy for.
Would I recommend it? I’m as cautious as Sarah. If I had seen the trigger warnings at the top of this review, I probably never would have considered it. But things which are recommended to depressed people have triggered me very badly before, whilst others which depressed people are warned against have been helpful to me. It’s so different for everyone. If I had been going through a period of serious anxiety, I wouldn’t have reacted well. But feeling as blank as I did at the time made this the perfect book for me. As it was, the only bit that deeply upset me was the one part at the end where the protagonist appears to display humanity regarding something to do with her friend (which you will know when you read it) – it stayed with me, that moment.
I would agree that if you want to read this, proceed with caution, and consider whether you need the separation of voice that the audiobook provided for Sarah.
As someone who struggles with his memory and sense of reality, this sounds terrifying on a multitude of levels. If I ever pick it up, it’ll be a library book for sure.
This sounds terrifying and fascinating (and horrifically relatable). I think I’ll look into seeing if there’s a library copy. I love an unlovable heroine–especially one who gets into the sticky ugly side of mental illness that isn’t comfortable to read or write about. It’s just so very human to me. (Some of those trigger warnings are definitely things I want to watch out for but at the same time knowing they’re there is often enough for me to be prepared.)
@Anony Miss: I have been trying to figure out how to answer your question re: a happy ending. It ends on/right after 9/11/01, so that’s not happy, and while the narrator has reached the end of her experiment? journey? process? the final images are jarring and haunting.
Thank you for reviewing this book. This is so going on my TBR pile!
There are times I feel out of step with other readers. First I wonder why anyone would wish to read a book which sounds relentlessly depressing. Then I wonder how it could be a bestseller. Which makes me look forward to reading more comments about this post. But read the book itself? Not if you paid me.
You’re supposed to hear the words in your head, actually. Students without a head-voice typically struggle with comprehension.
This is not the kind of book I would ever choose to read. It seems like one of those that becomes a bestseller because every book club in the land says ‘we should read this’ and then everyone buys it and nobody reads it and they end up drinking wine and discussing divorce instead.
But this line from the review: “a slow, cutting journey down a drugged serrated knife plot of, “Oh, honey. Oh, no.” That’s some good writing, right there.
I really want to know how the book ends. I will never read it, because of depression triggers, but I feel like I must know how it ends. Or rather, what happens from the moment Sara left the story.
Can anyone please tell me, perhaps in a spoiler tag?
Thank you!
Ok, spoilers below.
The narrator succeeds in sleeping for months – which isn’t quite the right word, because the drug she takes makes her black out, but she’s doing things in the three-day span while she’s under. She’s just not aware of them. She makes a deal with an artist to look after her while she’s taking the drugs, with the agreement that he be gone from the apartment every third day when she wakes up to drink water, take another pill, and go back to sleep.
She wakes up finally, and feels kind of like she’s reborn, that her fog or desire to sleep is gone. Then comes 9/11: her terrible ex is away on his honeymoon, but Reva is killed. The narrator buys a VCR so she can tape the footage and rewatch it to remind herself that “life is worth living.” She’s pretty sure that one of the jumping figures is Reva, and watches that footage over and over. The final line is pretty haunting: “There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.”
@Sara: thank you!
@Diana: You’re welcome!
@chacha1- Thank you for the compliment! I really, really appreciate that. 🙂
I loved this book, although it is certainly not for everyone. I read it on kindle and found myself consuming it compulsively.
As for why someone would want to read something so depressing, I can say that the writing has a lot to do with it. Moshfegh is a masterful writer and storyteller. It reminded me–not in content, but in general vibe–of Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life”, which was also insanely depressing and insanely good (imo)
I started reading this, but couldn’t finish it because it was just…too much. I was approximately the narrator’s age at the time the story takes place, and while I was in a much different psychological place both then and now, it was just the “welp I’m done with college and I don’t know what to do or how to be a functional adult” but taken to AN EXTREME DEGREE and I just. could. not. Even though the writing was gorgeous and precise and painful in its exquisiteness, I just couldn’t, it made me feel *so* ill at ease.
I loved this book!!! And I don’t know if I could have done it as an audiobook. I needed it slow and simmering, eaten at my own speed. There is so much to savor here- the writing is gorgeous. And it’s so funny. So dark and sarcastic.
As to why someone would want to read something so depressing: isn’t it worse to have sadness go unacknowledged? This didn’t feel like excessive or greedy wallowing in trauma or depression, the way a more emotionally manipulative book might.
Can we talk about the way the protagonist talked about her body??? OMG I loved it: her body was disgusting and so real. I was reading it and I had one of those moments where you realize you’ve been reading for 30+ years and yet you’ve NEVER READ about just how real a female body can be. She sweats, poops, menstruates, and fails to brush her teeth twice a day. It was glorious. I’d recommend it for that alone!!