So Many Pills: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
Yes, the title does make it sound like it’s the sequel to Eat, Pray, Love. But Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel is a darkly satirical take on that trope, which I’d like to call, “My Full-Time Job is Self-Discovery.” You know it well in bestsellers like Wild by Cheryl Strayed, or its adolescent first cousin a few times removed, On the Road by Jack Kerouac.
As someone who has fantasized countless times about taking my leave of capitalism (surely if I lived somewhere not unlike the setting of Call Me By Your Name, my life would be amazing and I’d never have problems again), I know this trope is programmed deep in the American psyche, and is a particularly potent cultural fixation in the 21st century. Each of us has our version of this story (is yours the film The Social Network, directed by David Fincher, in which the full-time self-discovery involves oops I accidentally invented something amazing during my luxurious party lifestyle at Harvard? Or is it the television series Gossip Girl in which full-time self-discovery involves attending a prep school in a full designer wardrobe and somehow never having homework?). There’s nothing inherently wrong with this fantasy, per se, except that I suspect it’s giving some of us a false sense of where true self-discovery “happens” — that it could happen in a span of one year, say, if only we didn’t have the pesky distractions of paying the bills, feeding ourselves and our families, checking up on our friends, or following the news. And it might even be propagating the idea that only those of us with the privilege to take our leave of capitalism — take sabbaticals, quit our unpleasant jobs, walk away from the trappings of our lives (they’re called “trappings” for a reason) — are entitled to Self-Discovery.
I’ve decided that I can only like Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, if I am allowed to classify it as a satire.
This is why I’ve decided that I can only like Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, if I am allowed to classify it as a satire. If it’s a parody of the Eat, Pray, Love genre, then we can hear a resonant sarcasm in the title. Who among us hasn’t been depressed and heard some version of, “All you need is a little bit of R & R, and you’ll be back to normal”? Despite the great rise in awareness of, and treatment for, mental illness over the past fifteen years, it is still rather common for people to suggest that one can will oneself out of depression, not unlike those delightful Victorian doctors who’d prescribe “country air” for the “exhausted” nobility of England.
The irony of Moshfegh’s novel, though, is that while its character refuses to name Depression-with-a-capital-D, she sets out to solve her self-proclaimed need for rest and relaxation using the very tool of the modern Psychiatric Industrial Complex: pills. And not just a healthy, prescribed dose of pills. So many pills. All at once. Self-administered (or slapdash-edly prescribed), alongside over-the-counter downers and sleepy stuff, like Benadryl and Dimetapp (man, I hadn’t heard that name in a while) and others.
The unnamed narrator and protagonist of this book, speaking as though projecting her memoir, is a wealthy Upper-East-Sider who’s orphaned, numb, and sick of everything. (Except Whoopi Goldberg. She loves Whoopi.) The year is 2000, but it could very well be 2018; this woman is exhausted, and it is abundantly clear that her brain chemistry could use some treatment, though it’s also clear that she hasn’t mourned her dead parents — and that’s work that she’s not up for. She might also be exhausted for the reasons that Victorian nobility were exhausted: by capitalism (for the Victorians, add in being colonizers); and by her own privileged milieu and its insipid myopia (though she, and the Victorians for that matter, are pre-mainstream Internet use, so she doesn’t even have Twitter fatigue).
There are some early clues that this is all, in fact, an ironic parody: when the narrator first mentions that even in her sleep cycle she “still looks flawless” — blond, skinny, “like a model.” More darkly, there are the painstaking descriptions of her wannabe-bestie Reva’s bulimia. Reva tries to subsist on “mini yogurts.” This detail is acutely real to those of us who are, or know a person, wrangling food demons (so, all of us?). The narrator coldly refuses to sympathize with Reva, whose mother is also dying of cancer. Instead, our narrator remarks with disgust that Reva is drinking too much, binge-eating, hankering to barf up her dinner, and pathetically pursuing her married boss. So, disgust appears to be the predominant emotion that has sent the narrator on her own binge: a sleep binge. She plots to sleep for an entire year, aided by these myriad drugs, prescribed by a truly incompetent shrink (who asks the narrator each and every time they meet about her relationship with her parents, each time getting the same answer: um, they’re dead).
At least I hope that’s the joke of the book: a very underworked, overwealthy, and emotionally numb person chooses “rest and relaxation” to cure her of her first world problems... because the first world doesn't have much else to offer for those problems. It’s funny, but only when there’s a knowingness lurking here. Like all good allegories, reality sets in during the most fantastical of scenes. The magical pill that seals her mission, a fictional drug called “Infermiterol” (“not yet approved by the FDA,” her shrink laments) causes periods of complete memory loss lasting several days. But in 2020, reading about a white girl emerging from a black-out, fearful for her bodily integrity, is all-too-reminiscent of the compulsory black-out drinking on college campuses that facilitates rape culture. In one scene, the narrator wakes from a three-day black-out from Infermiterol to find Polaroids of herself in an outrageous glittery designer outfit, at a club with famous and loathsome art world hacks. There's a love note on a post-it in her kitchen. Once again, she’s disgusted: quietly, stoically so. But she insists that it's simply because she wants to be alone, asleep, resting. She just needs rest. There’s no modern moment of recognition, of big-picture epiphany, as we get in books like Eat, Pray, Love, and Wild — you know, something like, This is the patriarchy!, or Wow, I’m an addict and I need help.
Moshfegh conjures the black-out as a space of possibility: control the conditions enough, and it can help you to reach your goals. (Self-Discovery.) Is that not an addict’s fantasy? And yet somehow, throughout a novel filled with miserable, pill-popping, eating disordered people, not once did I consciously attach the label of ‘drug addict’ to the narrator, a privileged white woman watching VHS tapes of Whoopi Goldberg movies until she falls asleep, day after day. That says more about me than anything else, and I think that’s the point. In its refusal to label these behaviors, Moshfegh’s novel normalizes them to a disturbing degree.
So disturbing, in fact, that I found myself more peeved by the possible anachronisms in the names of pharmaceuticals (did Ambien or Ativan exist in 2001?), and in the character’s use of her cell phone (come on, what 20-something used their cell as a primary mode of communication in 2001?!) than I did by the obvious impossibility of her surviving such heavy and regular overusage of medication. In each of her self-administered doses, the list of meds, often five or six long, is astounding and terrifying. This has to be a testament to Moshfegh’s verisimilitude. It began to dawn on me that her nameless character felt more probable than Cheryl in Wild, Sal in On the Road, Liz in Eat, Pray, Love — precisely because she never admits to an addiction, or because the addiction is the cure, not the catalyst, for the Self-Discovery. In an age of an opioid crisis directly facilitated by the pharmaceutical industry, this has to be a joke. It's a dark joke, but it's the kind that leaves a social critique in its wake.
To boot, it’s the year leading up to 9/11, and we know that the narrator’s rapey ex works in the Twin Towers. Once again, the novel has us conveniently forgetting that fact, and others, throughout the year of rest and relaxation; like the narrator, we are blacking out, making it all feel too surreal.
Maybe that’s Moshfegh’s point: 9/11 was surreal, and that surreal event kicked off the new millennium with such horror that all of us were ready to go back to bed and wake up 1000 years later. Or maybe just those of us who could afford to. I’m not sure what to make of a narrator with so little compunction and even less self-awareness — an unlikeable woman character of the highest order — except to imagine that she is laying bare something cold and dark at the heart of white, wealthy womanhood: the real possibility that a life in total black-out, in the relaxation of blissful sleep, is preferable to the truth of how boring and lonely it is at the top — as gnawingly unsatisfying as a mini yogurt.
