The Art of Good Storytelling
I came across My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh in July after falling down a Goodreads rabbit hole. After close to a year of not having read a single book, I opened up Goodreads in search of classic American lit. In my browsing, I somehow found the anti.
Where American classics predominantly devote themselves to the financial pains or the moral struggles of the middle class, My Year of Rest and Relaxation is about a skinny, pretty, white woman in her early 20s living in New York. She owns fine, expensive clothes and an Upper East Side apartment all the while being unemployed. She should be happy—however, she is a far cry from it.
Our narrator (I would tell you her name but Moshfegh did not divulge this piece of information to us in the book’s 289 pages) is trying to fill her body with enough Xanax and Ambien to sleep away an entire year of her life, and at the end of it wake up a new person, freed of her past’s inhibitions. This is the book’s only plot, really. The main character visits her hippie psychiatrist, gets a refill on her sleeping pills, takes them, blacks out for a couple days, wakes up in a haze—then does it all over again. Wash, rinse, and repeat.
It’s a repetitive book where nothing really happens and nothing much changes. Nevertheless, I was thoroughly entertained.
It’s hard for a book to be funny given its only material is words on a page. But My Year of Rest and Relaxation is hilarious, with the appearance of not even trying to be.
“I took a Polaroid of her one night and stuck it into the frame of the mirror in the living room. Reva thought it was a loving gesture, but the photo was really meant as a reminder of how little I enjoyed her company if I felt like calling her later while I was under the influence.”
The true star of the book, however, is Moshfegh’s prose. The book shifts from present to past, with the narrator recounting the events in her life that have so inspired her to embark on her year of rest and relaxation. We learn, for example, that her parents died within only months of each other, but they were never really pleasant to begin with—cold and neglectful towards the main character during her childhood. We also learn of her relationship with an emotionally abusive older man who leaves every couple of months at his convenience.
The story is told entirely in the first person, but instead of it being an emotional retelling of the narrator’s life like one might expect, it reads more like a factual account.
“I was not a narcoleptic - I never fell asleep when I didn’t want to. I was more of a somniac. A somnophile. I’d always loved sleeping. It was one thing my mother and I had enjoyed doing together when I was a child. She was not the type to sit and watch me draw or read me books or play games or go for walks in the park or bake brownies. We got along best when we were asleep.”
We learn of what happened to our narrator but are never told in depth of how she feels about those events happening, and how they’ve impacted her, apart from the fact they are “depressing”. The reader is led to infer a lot of these things on their own; and in doing that, is led to feel a deeper sympathy for the character than they would otherwise.
That is the art of good storytelling.
It doesn’t ask you for pity, it doesn’t ask you to feel anything—but you do, and you do with great concern.
Despite her selfishness and rudeness bordering on cruelty sometimes, not to mention her WASP privilege, the readers gain an appreciation for the circumstances that have made our main character so unbearable, and come to actually feel sorry for her.
If you’re looking for a book to read that is dark but funny with unlikeable characters but interesting character study, I’d recommend reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I’d just suggest maybe taking a shot before you do.
Header by: Ellie Horning
