Spent the better part of my Saturday (yesterday) alone, reading (and finishing) a great book in bed: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh.
My journey with this book is not finished, however. Not even close! I may have read all of the pages and words in the book, but in some ways the best parts of my adventure with this book are yet to come.
Since I finished reading the book yesterday, I have not stopped thinking about it. A number of my choices have even been directly influenced by the book and wanting to be immersed in it.
My decision to nibble on a low dose of Seroquel at 4 this morning, for example.
While Seroquel did nothing for our heroine / was not one of her (many) drugs of choice, it is something I have available to me and did allow me to sleep some extra hours. After the book is done, there is a feeling of being given permission to sample some of the main character’s extreme deep-dive into drug-induced sleep, like taking a little sample packet doled out by her crazy imaginary-friend-enabler psychiatrist, Dr. Tuttle.
Obviously(?) our narrator is not someone we’re supposed to want to emulate; she would be considered by many to be an extremely loathsome character (Ottessa Moshfegh’s characters are frequently filthy and on track to destroy themselves, but for some of us that makes them such good soothing company). For me, she functions a lot like Mavis Gary in Young Adult, only better. Like, you get to enjoy someone who thought they were better (hotter, cooler) than you in high school being distinctly not better than you, and giving you permission to be your socially-incompetent worst most-immature substance-abusing self for the hours you spend with her, or at least just lay in bed pulling your hairs out like one (or whatever your gross little self-soothing habit happens to be). She fully embodies your own exhaustion with trying to force yourself to make socially-acceptable facial expressions, and takes whatever steps necessary to opt out of trying. So maybe you spend a sloppy unhygienic weekend in bed indulging in your vices or some medically-unnecessary pharmaceuticals: consider it a post-book afterparty attended just by you and the idea of the author and the gifts of the characters and settings they gave to your head that will keep you company and condole you when you’re feeling low.
Okay, so obviously the word we’re looking for here is “console”, but plucking out and using this wrong word (condole instead of console) is another example of how we like to continue to travel with our favorite books and movies: using words and phrases and quoting shit or imitating sounds that we loved or were really funny or just stood out as strange and interesting to us. Like auditory triggers that immediately transport us into the time and space and vibe of a favorite story. Oddly enough, when I began typing a draft of this post, I mindlessly misspelled “journeys” as “journies”. When I noticed, it made me feel bonded again to this Ottessa Moshfegh world where our extremely bright but drug-addled narrator couldn’t even conjure the correct word (console) for the motions she was going through at her bereaved friend’s house for her mom’s funeral, performed fresh out of a blackout. Just saying or visualizing the word “condole” is like pulling a ticket stub out of my pocket for a place I’ve been and people I’ve met that remind me I like people who drift away from reality and detach from using language long enough to sometimes misplace words we once knew, and reassemble them in ways that have interesting meanings or tell of our own disassembled and jumbled states of mind: a state of creativity and curious dys-function that sometimes appears when we have fallen dangerously apart and lost our way but still have a profoundly impressive strong hope of making our way back to some kind of home. Even when we are skin and bones and have terrible bad breath and no idea how we’ve wound up here.
Another choice I deliberately made today to continue on my journey with My Year of Rest and Relaxation and its creator, Ottessa Moshfegh, was to rent and watch the movie Frantic with my wife. It’s a movie I would have wanted to watch eventually anyway (I have a thing for Roman Polanski’s Emmanuelle Seigner-era movies like Bitter Moon, The Ninth Gate, and The Ghost Writer), but especially today, knowing it was a movie featuring stars our super-tired grieving girl loved watching over and over again on her VCR (a machine I still keep tucked into a storage unit with tons of VHS tapes and often think of wistfully, valuing it the same way she did).
The eighties vibes of the movie and the age of our fucked-up heroine (born in 1973, same as I was) are a trip for me, too: a way of traveling back in time to things I can still smell and feel and taste and remember wanting. Of being the same age she was when these things were taking place (some imaginary, some not). It is a way of being transported into a very palpable nostalgic aesthetic at the snap of a whispered suggestion.
I find that books and movies featuring characters who ritualistically watch a lot of TV and talk about their shows and the people in them are favorite traveling companions of mine: Lizard Music and Welcome to Me come to mind, along with books by authors where music figures in strongly (Bukowski, Murakami). I think they are created by people who regularly access(ed) media as highly-immersive and meaningful escape portals so their work naturally functions in a similar way for those of us who consume it.
I’ve been looking forward to reading this book for years now, so much that I knew I wanted to own my own copy to keep and reread forever, and finally had the money to indulge in it as a sort of end-of-the-year Christmas present to myself (ever since reading Eileen I feel prompted to travel in my head with Ottessa Moshfegh’s characters during the dinginess of winter holidays, and MYoR&R is perfectly in sync with that). What I did not know, though, is that this is sort of a 9/11 book. And I am mostly not at all interested in 9/11 books, and in fact choose to avoid them. Maybe it’s better to say I am deeply resistant to or not the target audience of a lot of the types of 9/11 books that have been popular and lauded as must-reads. But this wound up being a perfect 9/11-ish book for me, and has even made me want to travel a little bit back to that, to stuff I did not want to visit or think about. This book made me able to hear a story where there is something universally spiritually accessible and meaningful about something specific to 9/11 without it just being about New York City or America or “terrorism”. This story acknowledges and allows for 9/11 journeys taken from an intimate but emotionally-detached distance, even from the imagined reality of what would certainly have been some New Yorkers’ arms’ lengths.
A lot of people read books to travel mentally to the places described between their covers. But today, for me, the book-ish travel I’m experiencing is on the planes of thoughts and memories and research and curiosity extending out past the closed and “finished” book I marked as “complete” yesterday. Venturing into nooks and crannies experienced by the character (drug-induced sleep, movies, the terrible real and surreal things most of us were fortunate to only see on our TV screens on 9/11).
It is as if a book is a city on a map marked by a big red dot, with all of these tendrils of roads and rivers radiating out from it, and with airports that make nonstop flights between this big red dot and other big and little red dots at other places on the map. And this whole map has notes and a key and clues written by the author of the red dots. You can just travel to the big red book dots and stay in them. Or you can keep re-opening the map(s) writers and moviemakers and artists have illuminated for us. Hang it on your wall. Add more flags to it. Become more and more familiar with the lay of their landscapes, hopping trains and rolling off here and there. Getting excited seeing routes criss-crossing places you’ve been to and routes you’ve traveled via other storytellers.