Unemployment was rolling in as long as I made the weekly call into the automated service and pressed “1” for “yes” when the robot asked if I’d made a sincere effort to find a job. Rent money from the tenants in that house showed up in my checking account by direct deposit every month. I’d already paid a year of property taxes on my apartment and on my dead parents’ old house upstate. The narrator continues, from describing the state of her homebound life, to explaining how it’s possible: News of this embarrassment opened him up to ridicule on the internet, only for him to die in late June of necrotic tissue disease, leaving even some of the news outlets that mocked him feeling contrite. For example, in May, a Transavia flight was forced to make an emergency landing in Portugal because of one passenger’s unbearable body odor.
MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION MOVIE YORGOS FREE
But it also falls into one of the categories that seems to be free for public criticism. No shaving.” Imagine being so sick that you want to perform these daily rituals, but they require too much energy. “I stopped tweezing, stopped bleaching, stopped waxing, stopped brushing my hair.
“I took a shower once a week at most,” the narrator claims. Her choice to sequester herself and allow her body to waste makes light of people who truly experience life-changing conditions that make self care difficult or impossible.
My dislike of the narrator goes deeper than irritation at her privilege. An occasional package from Barneys or Saks provided me with men’s pajamas and other things I couldn’t remember ordering - cashmere socks, tacky graphic T-shirts, designer jeans.īesides the comment about her ex-boyfriend, which hints at history and humanity, the rest of this paragraph is a calibrated waltz of wastefulness and privilege, deftly crafting the narrator’s low-key despicable persona within the novel’s first pages. I stuffed the little Baggies into the closet and went commando. For a while, tacky lingerie from Victoria’s Secret kept showing up in the mail - frilly fuchsia and lime green thongs and teddies and baby-doll nightgowns, each sealed in a clear plastic Baggie. All the old pairs reminded me of Trevor, anyway. So I just threw away my dirty underpants. And the sound of my own washer and dryer interfered with my sleep.
“Early on in this phase, I had my dirty laundry picked up and clean laundry delivered once a week,” the narrator says of the early days of her hibernation:īut after a while, it was too much trouble to gather up all the dirty clothes and stuff them in the laundry bag. She becomes so wasteful - disposing of time, money, and resources - that her pampered lack of need becomes disgracefully apparent. Hers is a decline into numb carelessness. On the one hand, who among us hasn’t wanted to sleep all day or at least voiced the desire to live an easier life? But the descent of Moshfegh’s narrator is more than that. The combination of these characteristics alone might be enough to irk some readers, but her ability to live off her parents’ money and social services while squandering her education and potential pushes her straight over the top. Not only is the narrator classically good-looking, like an “off-duty model,” as she puts it, but she was educated at an Ivy League school. Either way, this lack of interest in her own backstory presents a clever sleight of hand: the reader must take the narrator at her surface-level privilege, forcing her to be so unlikable and unrelatable that Moshfegh renders her as a clever satire of the upper class. While her parents did die while she was in college, Moshfegh spends little page time on the narrator’s relationship with them or her feelings for them, instead using their deaths as a way to explain how the narrator can afford to go into hibernation while the rest of the country (even in the novel’s early-2000s setting) labors to eke out an existence from paycheck to paycheck. It’s possible that the narrator experienced something to require this time on the mend. Why does the narrator need a whole year of rest and relaxation? But what she is healing herself of is a question that hangs over the novel. She becomes addicted to antidepressants and tranquilizers on purpose and withdraws into the squalid shell of her Upper East Side apartment in an effort, she claims, to heal herself. Maybe a certain amount of solitude is a necessary part of modern life, but the affluent, unnamed narrator in Ottessa Moshfegh’s latest novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, takes seeking solitude to a destructive extreme. Billed Into Silence: Money and the Miseducation of Women.
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