An Aesthetic of Unpleasantness: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh Review
Add this one to your sad girl shelf - if you haven't already
My Year of Rest and Relaxation has very divided reviews: some love it, some hate it. I’m team love.
Briefly summed up, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (or often referred to by its acronym MYORAR) features our female protagonist in a deeply depressed and overall apathetic state living at the start of the 2000s in New York. Per “luck”, she starts seeing one of the most incompetent psychiatrists ever, who prescribes her various types of drugs, offering her some sort of relief. So fed up with her morose life, however, she decides to hoard pills and go into a full-on hibernation, hoping to awake to a metamorphosed version of herself at the end of the year.
Moshfegh’s writing style is superb and the main reason for my lofty review, as the story itself is overall quite depressing. At times the novel feels like controversy for the sake of controversy, which I simultaneously appreciated and abhorred. It’s like enjoying the fact that it’s unpleasant to read, which refers to the title of this post; the aesthetic of unpleasantness. And there is a certain aesthetic to it, one that could be encampsulated by the by now popular tag of #sadgirl.
The characters are all unlikeable, especially the protagonist, obnoxious and privileged. And yet… I love to hate. There’s just a certain quality to the lyricism of the book and a certain je ne sais quoi that made it unputdownable to me.
some of my favourite quotes:
“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 felt myself float up and away, higher and higher into the ether until my body was just an anecdote, a symbol, a portrait hanging in another world.”
“I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.”
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