My Year of Rest and Relaxation - notes and highlights
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a 2018 novel by American author Ottessa Moshfegh- Moshfegh's second novel, it is set in New York City in 2000 and 2001 and follows an unnamed protagonist as she gradually escalates her use of prescription medications in an attempt to sleep for an entire year From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
WHENEVER I WOKE UP, night —
If you’re smart or rich or lucky Maybe you’ll beat the laws of man But the inner laws of spirit And the outer laws of nature No man can No, no man can
Not that what I was doing was suicide. In fact, it was the opposite of suicide. My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to save my life.
sounds like depression
he may as well have been molded out of plastic. Reva had a thing for older men, as did I. Men our age, Reva said, were too corny, too affectionate, too needy.
wtf ?????
Nothing hurt Reva more than effortless beauty, like mine.
be so for real rn
I once asked her whether her jealousy had anything to do with her being Jewish,
what
I took upwards of a dozen pills a day. But it was all very regulated, I thought.
of course it is
This is my year of rest and relaxation.”
OMG
“We’re all alone, Reva,”
ase, as expected
“You’re needy,”
girl bsff
I looked like a model, had money I hadn’t earned, wore real designer clothing, had majored in art history, so I was “cultured.”
mary sue much??? /j /hj
someone who loves you enough to point out all your flaws.
miss you,” she said, her voice cracking a little. Maybe she thought those words would break through to my heart. I’d been taking Nembutals all day. “We probably shouldn’t be friends,” I told her, stretching out on the sofa. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I see no reason to continue.”
But I was tall and thin and blond and pretty and young.
girl..
I could hear his cock harden on the phone whenever I called to beg him to come over and hold me.
I asked Trevor once, “If you could have only blow jobs or only intercourse for the rest of your life, which one would you choose?” “Blow jobs,” he answered. “That’s kind of gay, isn’t it?” I said. “To be more interested in mouths than pussies?” He didn’t speak to me for weeks.
Nobody up there listened to the Moldy Peaches.
They wouldn’t be distracted by “pussy,”
The truth was probably that they were just afraid of vaginas, afraid that they’d fail to understand one as pretty and pink as mine,
I thought that if I did normal things—held down a job, for example—I could starve off the part of me that hated everything.
Being pretty only kept me trapped in a world that valued looks above all else.
ok fair
my year of rest and relaxation.
I love you,”
I was actually on the Titanic and the dolphin was a shark that was also Moby Dick and also Dick Tracy and also a hard, inflamed penis, and the penis was giving a speech to a crowd of women and children and waving his gun around. “Then I saluted everyone like a Nazi and jumped overboard and everybody else got executed.”
“I was only teasing,” my mom said, batting the smoke of her own cigarette away from her face. “About the cancer?” “No.”
“You know, when you were a baby, I crushed Valium into your bottle? You had colic and cried for hours and hours, inconsolable and for no good reason. And change your shirt. I can see the sweat under your arms. I’m going to bed.”
“Have you ever heard the expression ‘eat shit or die’?” I asked. Reva unscrewed the tequila and poured more into her can. “It’s ‘eat shit and die,’” she said.
“Soon we’ll be old and ugly. Life is short, you know? Die young and leave a beautiful corpse. Who said that?” “Someone who liked fucking corpses.”
My AOL screen name was “Whoopigirlberg2000.” “Call me Whoopi.” “Call me Reva,” I
“There was shit all over my dick, okay?”
“I love you, Reva,” I heard myself say from so far away. “I’m really sorry about your mom.” Then I was gone.
“It didn’t happen overnight,”
I stepped closer to make sure there was no human-sized bloodstain, nobody wrapped up in the sheets, no corpse tucked under the bed.
One idiot said I was “broken by the male gaze.”
“You’re so skinny,” she said, between her sniffles. “No fair.”
She leaned over me on the sofa, kissed my cheek, said, “I love you,” and left.
“Today is the first day of the rest of your life! xoxo”
“Oh, shut up, Reva.” “I love you.” Maybe she did, and that’s why I hated her.
What would come later would be only airy remembrances of the thing called love she used to give me.
She was beautiful, with all her nerves and all her complicated, circuitous feelings and contradictions and fears. This would be the last time I’d see her in person. “I love you,” I said. “I love you, too.”