To sleep existential torment away, for a whole year
After Ottessa Moshfegh wrote the first 100 or so pages of her wild, funny and profound new novel, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” she stopped and put it aside. The 37-year-old author spent a year away, one full of personal challenges, she says, before returning to the story.
“Each project is like a kind of spiritual lesson, maybe, and my job is to be dutiful to it,” said Moshfegh, who in the past few years has established herself as a singular literary voice with works such as her acclaimed debut novel, “Eileen.”
“This book told me to wait because life was going to throw all this s— at me and was going to teach me stuff so that I would understand the book better and understand how to finish it. I just had that instinct.”
As for what those challenges were and what occurred in the year in between, Moshfegh treads carefully around her words.
“I would be comfortable just saying that it was in the category of learning self-acceptance,” she said, pausing and considering for long periods. “And dealing with an unstable sense of reality. I can only really be cryptic because it was so private.”
The specifics of what Moshfegh is wary of explaining, which she has perhaps opened up about before, feel in some way connected to the protagonist of “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” — an unnamed woman who decides to spend a year in hibernation sleeping away the existential torment of her life.
Jaded and scarred after the death of her parents, Moshfegh’s antiheroine begins to see an absurd, quack psychiatrist who provides what amounts to a personal apothecary of prescription pills, from Xanax and Nembutal to a terrifyingly potent, fictional pill called Infermiterol. She uses them every waking moment to close herself off to the world in a haze of drug-induced sleep and the background noise of Whoopi Goldberg movies.
The premise emerged from what Moshfegh calls a fantasy of sorts for herself, though not with the same motivations.
“I’m somebody who doesn’t sleep a lot and feels incredible pressure to always be doing something that’s going to advance my understanding myself as an artist and add to my life,” she said. That level of pressure makes the idea of sleeping for a year an enticing proposal.
What the protagonist does mirror in Moshfegh is the weight of existential alienation.
“In my early 20s it was a huge, overwhelming and terrifying obsession — what it meant to exist, how it was possible, what was really real,” Moshfegh said. “How is it that there’s a planet populated with these creatures with this kind of consciousness, with a history, an unknown future?”
These questions became the foundation of her development into adulthood, she says, and her only relief from this angst was “found through creativity with a sense of the absurdity of it all.”
Then, while she was living in New York City, the 9/11 attacks happened. In the chaotic aftermath, Moshfegh spent a day wondering whether a cousin of hers who worked in the World Trade Center had died.
“In that space, I reconciled a lot of my existential questions, which suddenly became obvious as theoretical escapism,” said Moshfegh, who implicitly situates 9/11 as a looming event in the book. “Like, oh, this real stuff is happening in my world. Why am I spending so much time wondering what else is out there and how it’s even possible? There are people that I love. It kind of snapped me out of a lot.”
This tension, how to engage with a world that you only want to escape from, serves as the crux of the Moshfegh’s novel.
“If I’m hoping for the book to do anything,” she said, “it’s to inspire people to live.”