My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

★☆☆☆☆ (1/5)

A selection of my favorite passages from the book

• Walking up First Avenue, everything made me cringe. I was like a baby being born— the air hurt, the light hurt, the details of the world seemed garish and hostile.

• I loved Reva, but I didn’t like her anymore.

• She was a slave to vanity and status, which was not unusual in a place like Manhattan, but I found her desperation especially irritating. It made it hard for me to respect her intelligence. She was so obsessed with brand names, conformity, “fitting in.”

• She saw my struggle with misery as a cruel parody of her own misfortunes. I had chosen my solitude and purposelessness, and Reva had, despite her hard work, simply failed to get what she wanted— no

• I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me.

• “Mirth,” Dr. Tuttle said. “I like it better than joy. Happiness isn’t a word I like to use in here. It’s very arresting, happiness.

• moment we start making generalizations, we give up our right to self-govern.

• Then he’d be there and I’d shiver in his arms like the child I still was, swoon with gratitude for his recognition, savor the weight of him in the bed next to me.

• They were so self-serious and distracted by their conversation with their look-alike companions that you’d think they were wrestling with a decision of such high stakes, the world might explode. They wouldn’t be distracted by “pussy,” they would have me believe. The truth was probably that they were just afraid of vaginas, afraid that they’d fail to understand one as pretty and pink as mine, and they were ashamed of their own sensual inadequacies, afraid of their own dicks, afraid of themselves.

• “Blondes are distracting. Think of your beauty as an Achilles’ heel. You’re too much on the surface. I don’t say that offensively. But it’s the truth. It’s hard to look past what you look like.”

• market is moving away from emotion. Now it’s all about process and ideas and branding. Masculinity is hot right now.”

• 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. 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.

• I knew in my heart— this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then— that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.

• I wanted to hold on to the house the way you’d hold on to a love letter. It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world. But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.

• And I’d feel sorry for myself, not because I missed my parents, but because there was nothing they could have given me if they’d lived. They weren’t my friends. They didn’t comfort me or give me good advice. They weren’t people I wanted to talk to. They barely even knew me.

• I might have felt better if he were dead, I thought, since behind every memory of him was the possibility of reconciling, and thus more heartbreak and indignity.

• I sensed Reva’s misery in the room with me. It was the particular sadness of a young woman who has lost her mother— complex and angry and soft, yet oddly hopeful. I recognized it. But I didn’t feel it inside of me. The sadness was just floating around in the air. It became denser in the graininess of shadows. The obvious truth was that Reva had loved her mother in a way that I hadn’t loved mine. My mother hadn’t been easy to love. I’m sure she was complicated and worthy of further analysis, and she was beautiful, but I didn’t ever really know her. So the sadness in the room felt canned to me. It felt trite.

• They turned off the machine and I sat there, waiting, watching the screen blip, then stop. She wasn’t resting. She was not in a state of peace. She was in no state, not being. The peace to be had, I thought, watching them pull the sheet over her head, was mine.

• The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn’t exist yet. I was making it, standing there, breathing, fixing the air around my body with stillness, trying to capture something— a thought, I guess— as though such a thing were possible, as though I believed in the delusion described in those paintings— that time could be contained, held captive.

• There was majesty and grace in the pace of the swaying branches of the willows. There was kindness. Pain is not the only touchstone for growth, I said to myself. My sleep had worked. I was soft and calm and felt things. This was good. This was my life now.