I spoke to Georgia Greaves on My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
I read this book in January, about a wealthy New Yorker who decides to hide away from the world in her Upper East Side apartment sleeping for days at a time on a cocktail of infermiterol, ativan, and neuroproxin.
Back then, the concept of holing up in your house for several months seemed quaint. Something that might have happened in a previous generation perhaps, but would be impossible in our hyper-connected world. It was the perverse attraction of the idea of pulling down the shutters and pulling the duvet over my head that made the book intriguing to me. Three months on, of course, the book is eerily prescient. A prediction of a situation that not one girl alone in a city but almost every individual across the world would be forced into in a matter of weeks.
So, it felt like a good time to talk it through with my fellow bookworm and Louis XIV scholar Georgia Greaves. When we caught up over Zoom, Georgia had just finished moving her library of books from Sheffield to London and was unloading it onto a bookshelf decorated with fairy lights and succulents planted in little clay pots.
Turning the book over in her hands, Georgia says the story has her given her plenty to think about during the mandatory confinement.
‘Even though the protagonist’s confinement is self-imposed, there are passages that resonate with our current situation.’
She thumbs through the pages to read me a passage:
‘”the days are slipping into one, not sure what’s sleep and what’s reality. During this lull in the drama of sleep. Sleeping, walking, it all collided into one grey monotonous plane ride through the clouds.”’
A lot makes sense here in our current situation. We’ve lost our normal framework of life which over the days and weeks affects our concept of time passing, and as our connection to the outside world is diluted, the line is blurred between dream and reality.
‘She knows she wants to have this year to fall asleep and she knows she’s going to emerge from the other end. That is the same for us, we know it’s just temporary,’ Georgia says. ‘Although, unlike us, she’s imposed it on herself, it’s still the same, we’re just passing the time until it changes and we can go outside again.’
‘On a less obvious note, this is all about how she’s coping with her life. Her mechanism is through sleep, what she believes is going to get her through difficult periods in her life. It isn’t the route most people would go down, but it seems to work for her at the end. This is what a lot of us are doing at the moment.’
The book is set in 2001, ending just after 9/11 so that the plot covers the protagonist’s life before the tragedy (rather than after it, as is usually the case with 9/11 literature). The narrative is handled carefully, so the reader gets swept along by the absorption of the protagonist in the minutia of their life and the arrival of 9/11 comes as a surprise as much to us as to her.
‘It’s strange that a book about that disaster isn’t really about that at all.’ Georgia continues, flipping through a neat row of post-it notes marking moments in the book. ‘It’s just ultimately just a fact of life at the end of the book… even then it’s told in a very matter of fact manner. Almost an uncommon reaction… I ask myself is it actually about the twin towers, did she set out to write about it? Or is it a message about people sleepwalking through life until a really big thing happens?’
There’s another lesson here, Georgia explains. In her rare trips out to the local corner shop, the main character glances at events splashed across the magazines and newspapers – Bush versus Gore, Californian wild fires, earthquake in South East Asia.
‘It’s very strange that a lot of these events also happened in the last year,’ she says. ‘Is this a comment that we read these headlines and think it’s bad but nothing really affects us, and then it just happens again, still sleepwalking? It’s the same now with the news articles about covid 19. There was more shock at the start of it. Now there are 600 deaths a day, we can easily slip into feeling detached and numb to it. It’s not a shock anymore. That’s very revealing about human nature. Does this exposure make us more complacent?’
The book is complex and has a deep, and sometimes disturbing, story about friendship at its heart. The protagonist herself is emotionally stunted, cruel and guilty of all conformity and neediness that she despises in other people. She takes desperate steps to cleanse herself of her ills and there’s a sense of bitter-sweet rebirth in the ending. Will we as a society be able to affect our own rebirth and emerge from lockdown with the same sense of renewal? I have my doubts but, in the absence of any certainty, we can take heart from the message in My Year of Rest and Relaxation and have hope.
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