PLOT EXPLANATION The plot of My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh is unique and explains an unnamed main character who wants to become a brand new person and avoid any and all reality. She plans to take countless prescribed pills in hopes that she will be able to get her desired rest of about a year (hence the name My Year of Rest and Relaxation). The main character believes that the more she isolates herself from the world, the better of a person she will become. She sleeps for most of her days and dreads her waking hours. The main character seems to value sleep more than anything else in this world. “Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.” The main character says.
REVA One part of this book that really intrigues and confuses me, is the narrator's relationship with her best friend named Reva. The narrator has known Reva since they were in college. "I loved Reva but I didn't like her anymore. We'd been friends since college, long enough that all we had left in common was our history together, a complex circuit of resentment, memory, jealousy, and denial" said the main character. This is really how she feels and that is shown throughout the book. The narrator is constantly annoyed and unhappy with her "best friend" Reva, although they always kept each other around.
DISTURBING DREAMS In chapter three we learn the main character has started dreaming lot’s of dreams about her dead parents. Shockingly, I would say this was a part of the book that has disturbed me the most so far. “I dreamt my dad had an illegitimate son he kept in the closet of his study. I discovered the boy, pale and undernourished, and together we conspired to burn down the house.” The main character explains about one of her dreams. She explains another dream “I dreamt that I lathered up my mother’s pubic hair with a bar of Ivory soap in the shower, then pulled a tangle of hair out of her vagina. It was like the kind of fur ball a cat coughs up, or a clog in a bathtub drain. In the dream, I understood that the tangle of hair was my father’s cancer.” These were the two most disturbing dreams that the main character explains having. I believe that the countless drugs and sleeping pills she was taking definitely influenced a lot of her dreams to be worse, or more disturbing than they would have been had she not been on the drugs. I think It's really interesting that the author of this book, Ottessa Moshfegh is able to come up with such odd and confusing ideas and plots in her book, such as these dreams.
BRAINSTORMING FOR CREATIVE STORY I would like to take inspiration from My Year of Rest and Relaxation's shocking and strange plot and use this in the creative story that I'm currently brainstorming. I want to include a plot and characters that confuse people and create polarizing opinions just like My Year of Rest and relaxation. I also want to include a depressed character in my story, one that also uses some odd coping mechanism to escape her life, or maybe one to add more excitement to it. Something that this book shows is how different peoples perspectives on life can be. You sometimes don't think about it but everyone thinks about life in a different way and I think this book does a great job at showing how the main character thinks in a different way than you. I think this is something interesting to think about and something to brainstorm off of for my creative story as well.
second book review
FINAL PLOT EXPLANATION I have now read the entirety of My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. Now that I have read the whole book I can give an explanation of the whole plot... The main character and narrator of the book, who is unnamed lives on the upper east side of New York in a penthouse apartment. She inherited this apartment and her money from her very wealthy parents who passed away while she was in college. The main character's plan is to sleep as much as she possibly can to preserve her mind from irritating people and reality. She starts off by sleeping for long hours of the day, to multiple days, sometimes weeks, and by the end of the book she slept for 6 months straight. The main character lies to her therapist (Dr. Tuddle) so that she can be prescribed with countless sleeping pills and drugs helping her sleep for long periods of time. There are four other characters in the book, Reva who is the main characters best friend, Trevor who is her ex boyfriend, Dr. Tuddle who is her therapist prescribing her with the pills, and Ping Xi. This character, Ping Xi used to work with the main character at an art gallery she got fired from and later used the main character as a subject for a disturbing art piece. At the end of this book, the main character and Ping Xi agreed that he would paint her as she slept during her 6 month self induced coma. On the very last page of the book the main character had woken up from her longest coma to see a recording of her best friend Reva dying as she jumped off the twin towers on 9/11/2001.
REVA Reva has been the main character's best friend since college. The relationship they have with each other is very one sided. Reva treats the main character with care like you do with all of your friends, except this treatment is not given in return from the main character. Reva often visits the main character at her home to check up on her because she is obviously worried about the large amounts of sleep she's getting and the copious drugs she's taking. The main character doesn't see this as the sweet or caring thing to do, but she sees it as "annoying" and didn't like how it got in the way of her rest. The main character would always answer Reva in little words, mostly never full sentence's, and would often times say something boring or rude in response. Reva came over to the main characters apartment one day and started crying as she told her that her mom had just passed away, all the main character had to say in return was "shit." and after the main character says "Revas sniffles and signs could have lulled me to sleep. But I could not sleep. I closed my eyes. When the next episode about crop circles, started, Reva poked me. "Are you awake?" I pretended like I wasn't." This shows how little sympathy and remorse she had for her best friend and how she's feeling at this time. Most people would feel the need to comfort their friend and be there for them if they were in this position. Shortly after Reva mentioned her mothers death to the main character she also mentioned that she was holding a funeral and that she wanted the main character to come. She was annoyed with this idea as well. The main character took the bus into Revas home town (location of the funeral) and Reva began talking about how sad she was and explaining how she wished her mom was buried instead of cremated. The main character explained how it was predictable" of Reva to say something like that. During this same car ride the main character explains... "I truly hated Reva in that moment, watching her navigating the icy roads craining her neck to see over the dash from the sunken seat of the car." One more example is when Reva took all of the sleeping pills that the Main character was overdosing on to her house so that she would stop taking them and the main character wanted to end their friendship over it. "Are you a medical doctor? Are you some kind of expert? If my shit isn't back in that medicine cabinet by tonight, we are done. Our friendship is over. I will never want to see you again." She says in a voicemail to Reva. The weird thing is that Reva never ended the friendship nor did she ever try to distance herself from the main character even through all of the disrespect. Reva worked at the twin towers in New York and on the very last page of the book, the main character explains how she had a VHS tape of Reva falling from the tower, dying. She watched this tape on repeat and all she said was that she was overcome with awe "not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I'll never see her again, but because she is beautiful." she said. FINAL THOUGHTS AND IDEAS FOR MY CREATIVE STORY I like this book because I have never read anything similar to it. I would recommend this book to you but you have to keep a very open mind while reading. The reason for this is because the best part of reading the book is how and absurd the plots and ideas are. Sometimes this book can even make you uncomfortable while reading because of how strange the authors ideas get. I really like the creativity Ottessa Moshfegh used while writing this book and it makes me inspired to come up with eerie and odd ideas for my own creative story.Another thing I like about this book is how the main character is narrating it, and how you can tell how skewed her vision of reality is based on her narration. I think I want the main character to narrate my personal creative story just like My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Overall I would say this book is definitely not for everyone, but you cant deny how special the creativity that Ottessa Moshfegh put into writing My year of Rest and Relaxation was.