A review by brightface77
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

dark funny reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

At the heart of the book is a critique of white women feminism and the illusion of choice feminism as a guiding ethos for your life. Near the beginning of the book marriage is described as being an in home prostitute, so she enters the art world as her career. But there she sees it for what it is as well - something so shallow and fake that she might as well be working on Wall Street. She sees her two choices for what they are - an illusion. But what is her alternative?

It’s set in a time when the internet was not the information highway it is today; where people depended more on their community, professional help, books, movies and tv for support and guidance on how to face challenges. We see her wanting compassion and understanding from her sorority sisters, her parents, her aunt, Reva, her boss, her boyfriend. She turns to everyone in her life, but every time they were more repulsed by her inability to keep it together and run. No one providing any support other than platitudes. 

She turns to professional help and again she comes back empty handed except for some prescription medication. 

With all her options squashed and nothing else presenting itself she decides the best she can do is wait for something better to become magically available. In the end, she is a pick me because that’s what girls like her are told by everyone in their life that they are supposed to be. To her credit, she might not have been a pick me for just men but that life would present the solution like it does in movies. In the meantime she turns to dreams and fantasy which aren’t tied to the same corrupt rules of her reality.

You know that she is aware of the illusion in her choice of stay at home mom or career girl in her last act of rest.
She turned it into art but because she felt trapped in the patriarchal oppression of both choices, she was passive in the creation and left a man to interpret and perceive her.

Without the internet, I wouldn’t know about decentering men, decolonization, decentering capitalism and how widespread systemic oppression is and neither did she. I hope she’s having a moment now in present day, like I am.
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