Reading "My Year of Rest and Relaxation"

When I got home, my Christmas amaryllis was (finally) in bloom. So that was something.

There was six inches of snow on the ground, but it was 65° out, so ding! ding! ding! Cognitive dissonance.

I went running. It felt good to use my body.

I got halfway through Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Moshfegh is an exceedingly brilliant writer both at the line-by-line level—I was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you'd feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide—and at the macro level in terms of cohesion between the novel’s plot and its symbolic and thematic elements.

BUT… the novel has one major flaw. I’m surprised no reviewer mentioned it. People did not use smart phones in 2000-2001. I should know! I was there! I had a cell phone so I could cold-call the Hollywood producers I needed to cold-call, but that cell phone weighed two pounds, and it certainly didn’t do Internet tricks.

An anachronism that glaring will generally throw me right out of a novel, so it’s a testament to Moshfegh’s extreme literary agility that I kept reading.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is actually a contemporary novel, but its plot twist involves events that took place in 2001, so it had to be set then.

And as soon as I saw that year, I immediately guessed how the novel would end.

It was supposed to be some sort of mind-boggling plot twist. But, I mean—how could it be?

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Shortly, I must resume plugging away at my own novel.

But I’m deep in mourning for my furry little orange pal, which means I’m feeling sentimental. Not the right headset at all for channeling June. In fact, June’s personality is very like that of the anonymous protagonist in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, so maybe in that sense I’m doing prep work.

Ottessa Moshfegh is currently a Stegner fellow.

One of my yearly rituals used to be applying for a Stegner fellowship.

One year, I was informed, I actually came very close to acceptance with a story I wrote about my X-husband called Terroir and Jayne LeGros. (I suspect what the judging committee liked was my appropriation of the term “terroir” as a state property of geographic place rather than as a wine descriptor.)

I am wondering now if the first two chapters of If You Find This, Take It might be good enough to submit to the Stegner folk.

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Meanwhile I have lots and lots of bills to pay but very little motivation to do any actual work.
Needs must. Etcetera, etcetera.