My Year of Rest and Relaxation

"It’s funny, because that’s such a dark book, but it’s actually the lightest of the five. The friendship in it is very sweet, actually: it’s about two women, one of whom doesn’t have a name, and her best friend, Reva. They’re both brilliant comic characters, but Reva really lived on with me. Ottessa Moshfegh has this ability to say so much with little spiky details that linger. Though I read it over a year ago, I just vividly remember Reva, glugging Diet 7-Up, obsessed with her fake Gucci purses, or going to Pilates and talking about her nights going out to gay bars in the West Village. She’s just this hilarious creature of a moment: the basic girl from 2000. But she’s actually the only source of love in the novel. She cares and worries for the narrator. In fact, the most poignant, life-changing moment in the book at the very end is about Reva. She’s a character who all along has had a comic element to her, so I was surprised by how profound the ending to do with her fate was. It’s what happens to Reva that ends our narrator’s stretch of total self-destruction. “ My Year of Rest and Relaxation is the anti-wellness manifesto” I read it as a rebuke to our culture of wellness, which was so refreshing. It’s the anti-wellness manifesto: this woman is basically poisoning herself every hour of the day with all sorts of pharmaceuticals. Coming from a culture where everyone is glugging turmeric juice and matcha powders and charcoal, reading about this woman who’s hilariously, greedily downing her medications—as much as she can get from the one other person in the book she talks to, her horrible psychiatrist, who’ll give her absolutely anything under the sun—was just great. That is hilarious. I wonder if the therapist went into this place of defensiveness—‘We actually don’t do that! Why is she depicting us as these thoughtless monsters?’ But the book itself is so prickly and so deranged, and that’s the only culture or environment in which a character like Reva could survive in a way that pleases me. If Reva were dropped into any other book that was a little more earnest or full of heart, she’d probably really annoy me, or I would’ve thought her more two-dimensional. But instead, there’s a contrast: Reva is this night-clubbing, narcissistic bulimic who’s actually really devoted to her friend. The narrator isn’t necessarily a bad friend to Reva. She’s a very ill person; she’s a bad friend to herself , mostly. (Though she’s a good friend to herself by being friends with Reva). But Reva is a saint for putting up with this person, who won’t even accompany her anywhere. The narrator is a drag; it’s all about her problems. Reva has to operate in the world friendlessly, because her best friend is lying on the couch in a stupor for most of the book. It’s very off-balance, which is really interesting. That element of a friendship fascinates me: sometimes the dynamic isn’t the thing that suddenly changes, but rather it’s one person’s attitude. Something that’s been simmering, something that’s been the status quo, will suddenly prompt one person to disrupt the ecosystem of a friendship and say ‘I can’t do this anymore.’"