Senior Journal 2
Arden Almond
The first time I read My Year of Rest and Relaxation, I was on a five-hour bus ride to the airport through rural Costa Rica, half falling asleep on my friend’s shoulder and half sugar-high on gummy candies.
I was crammed into the back-corner window seat and the blonde boy in the row in front of me had his seat leaned all the way back, trapping my legs beneath it. He’d spent the better part of the first two hours turned around in his seat, alternately hand-feeding me candy from a plastic bag with the Minions on it and pretending to be asleep while I recited parts of the Twilight books from memory.
After a while, my friend got bored of listening to me, and she pulled out her book from her backpack and handed it to me. It was the book she’d been reading throughout the whole trip, the one she’d read aloud to me on the five-hour bus ride from the airport two weeks before. The hot pink Sans Serif font of the title blazed up at me, splashed across Portrait of a Young Woman in White, and I felt an immediate pull towards the book, for its neon brashness in the face of a publishing industry full of carefully curated pastel covers and curling fonts. Five minutes later, I was a chapter deep, and the sharp wit of Ottessa Moshfegh was being seared across my bones, an inkless tattoo on my heart.
Even now I can see the words on the page, how the unnamed narrator’s shitty ex-boyfriend Trevor tells her that her “beauty is [her]Achilles heel”, how she’ll never be taken seriously because she’s “too much on the surface”. I remember the final scene, when she watches her well-loved tape recording of 9/11, and her belief that her friend Reba is the woman jumping off the building, suspended in the air, one too-small designer heel dangling from her right foot. I remember her dreaming that she was the white fox in the meat freezer, curled into a ball, slipping into death silently and calmly, welcoming the darkness just as she welcomes the drug-induced haze of her illegally prescribed Infermiterol. I remember her thanking God for Reba, but only because her friend’s greed would save her from her own vanity. I remember reading the book once through, and then reading it again, murmuring sentences aloud to that blonde boy and watching as his face twisted in confusion, explaining the book by saying “it’s a girl thing” in unison with my friend in the seat next to me, laughing with her, at all the meaning encapsulated in those four words.
“It’s a girl thing”, we said, and it is.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a deeply feminine book, entangled in societal expectations for women, how we see ourselves and how other people see us, how the two can warp and become the same, how women are constantly shapeshifting and metamorphosing and yet coming out behind themselves every time. It’s a book about mothers – the narrator’s alcoholic mother who committed suicide, Reba’s suffocating mother whose death brought out the worst in her, the mothers that the narrator sees walking in Central Park with their babies bundled up against the cold. It’s a book about sex, undeniably so – the pseudo-sadomasochistic sex the narrator has with Trevor, the casual sex she has with strangers, the sex that Reba has with her boss that Reba herself manages to twist into some form of love. It’s a book about drugs – the drugs that the narrator takes on her nights out, thelaundry list of prescription drugs her half-psychotic psychiatrist gives her to treat her non-existent insomnia, the experimental drugs that Reba is constantly trying in an attempt to lose those “last few pounds”. It’s a book about art – its subjectiveness, the narrator’s constant battle to see herself as an artist rather than an art piece – a struggle that mirrors her battle to be recognized as a person instead of an object.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is anything but relaxing. There is no single definition for this book. There is no satisfying ending. There is no moral to the story, and there is no good or bad either, only shades of darker and darker grey. The narrator is a terrible person, and the people she interacts with are even worse. The climax of the book comes barely a dozen pages before the end, and barely feels like a climax. The entire book shivers with existential tension that is never fully released, only sedated, pushed back until the next wave of it inevitably breaks over the narrative.
But I love this book nonetheless, for all these things, for the way that I see myself reflected in its pages – the desperate, clawing need to be born anew, to reinvent oneself constantly, to become more than what you are; the constant fear that whatever you become, it will not be enough, that no one will ever really see past the glimmering surface that you craft for them; the delusion, the casual cruelty, the terrible desire to rip yourself open just to see what comes spilling out. This book changed me, and for that I will never forgive or forget it, but I will love it just the same.