My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Moshfegh, Ottessa - book review

Rating 3.5/5
Genre Contemporary

A woman in her late 20s works at an art gallery. She has had a troubled past with parents who were distant, selfish and uncaring. She has an inner voice that is highly judgemental and critical. She looks at everything and everyone with hatred and dislike. She doesn't like this about herself and wants a transition so profound that there is no trace left of the past her. She thinks sleeping endlessly without break for a year would help her erase her past and past self. To be reborn again as a new her.

She finds a psychiatrist on yellow pages and tells her all kinds of stories and lies to get prescriptions for powerful drugs. The doctor Dr.Tuttle is quite a character who is wierd, forgetful, sloppy and incompetent. She uses loopholes in the insurance system to prescribe drugs for hearing loss, anxiety, paranoia etc when the complaint our protagonist has is insomnia. She even gives samples of drugs that are not approved to be in the market. Soon addicted to these different drugs, she gets fired from her job and breaks away from her friend Reva who is a fashion junkie, a bullimic and adores the protagonist for her looks, wealth and rich clothes, accessories etc.

She experiments for a year taking different dosages of drugs and sleeping from them. She suffers from blackouts and does things which her awake self doesnt remember.(For a while I contrmplated if she perhaps has a split personality that is triggered into awareness due to the drug induced sleep). She finds a solution to her blackouts. A way of not hurting or killing herself during these blackouts. So does she succeed in her mission to erase her memories of a haunting past?

I loved reading the book. Well, a part of it. It got very interesting when she started having blackouts and that raised my curiosity for quite a bit as to what will come next. But it loses its element of suspense soon after that. There are a few things the protagonist does which are so disgusting and gross i didnt think i could read past that page but somehow i got through(this novel pulls us to a level of awareness of someone's real private selves and their dark thoughts,uncouth actions..how much can one take it depends on the reader). I am also a bit skeptical of how easily she got out of her addiction to the drugs at the end given what she has gone through.

I thought the style of writing resembled a bit to Chuck Palahnuik but i like Ottesa's writing better. The author is a gifted writer with a natural flair for telling stories.. she has quite an active imagination because there are concoctions of many tales with in this story.