This year's new self-care plan: sleeping through all life

It is the summer of 2018, and America seems sapped of hope. We exchange self-care techniques and links to petitions "abolish ICE" with the same desperation. Sometimes, as Tina Fey suggested on "Saturday Night Live" last summer, the political reality seems so bad that it's tempting to ignore the protests, to hide from the house and devour a whole cake

. sheetcaking technique, a way to keep the rigors of life in hell at a distance. The joke, as many critics have claimed and Fey herself admitted later, was also a manifestation of some kind of privilege – that for many white and affluent liberals, the American upheaval is an external disturbance that can be upset.

In the novel novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Repos and Relaxation the anonymous narrator takes the sheetcaking to the max – not with cakes, but with sleeping pills, shopping online Thai crackers and takeaways and pizzas. She is a gorgeous 20 year old gallery in Manhattan whose parents died when she was in college. At the beginning of the book, she decides to spend as much time sleeping as possible in hopes of healing her existential anxiety. She has been alienated, alone, not sure why she is scorned and bored for things that she expects to love and appreciate, like her best friend Reva.

At first, she just wants the drug to numb her. "Life would be more tolerable if my brain was slower to condemn the world around me," she thinks. Soon, she kisses sleep, hoping to be reborn a new person, someone who feels warmth and hope again. "My hibernation was self-conservative," she insists. "I thought it was going to save my life."

She loses her job, but it does not matter: she has savings, rents from the tenants of her deceased parents' house, a high credit limit, her apartment and nothing to stop him from spending his nights and days in an Ambien Mist. Her accomplice is an unscrupulous psychiatrist named Dr. Tuttle, a slightly sloppy woman with a sharp strategic mind when it comes to dropping as many casualties as possible covered by insurance, but a general disorder of anything else related to the mental health of his patient.

Moshfegh's vision of a world retreat mimics sheet-making in another way: it's all about comfort, not quality. That goes for food – a sweet cake, a regular diet of takeaways and cookies – and everything else. She sleeps so much, and eats so little, that this fat diet leaves her leaner, more modeled than ever. The narrator avoids provocative art, books and movies. She deliberately ignores the news.

Instead, she wears her VCR watching and reviewing the Whoopi Goldberg comedies and the Harrison Ford action movies that she already knows by heart. "The foolish the movie is, the less my mind has to work," she notes. Feeling rowdy, sad, cheerful or any other deep emotion pulls her out of her perpetual dizziness; it would be a problem.

All this seems painfully familiar. When we are not in tatters with political agita, we retreat to our blind distractions of choice: "Real Housewives", "Fortnite", Hallmark movies, "SportsCenter", anything that does not make us feel or think of something too exhausting.

But for this woman, the policy is not the catalyst for her. Withdrawal. My year of rest and relaxation is set in 2000 and 2001, at the end of Clinton's prosperous years. The narrator lives in a cocoon even before having studied the retreat of the world; she has a job in a glitzy art gallery, a beautiful apartment in an impersonal building of the Upper East Side, expensive gym memberships, nights out in discotheque. As she begins her year of sleep, afloat on a sea of ​​Dimetapp, she notes that it has never been easier for her "to ignore things that did not concern me." "Things were happening in New York City," she wrote, "but none of this has affected me."

Moshfegh's book is by no means an answer to Tina Fey.But in the fun mirror of the house she holds the fetish of self-care of the privileged, the reality of sheetcaking becomes clear: it is the farthest from politics.The tradition to which it belongs not a manifestation of social protest, but of consolidated wealth and social status.

And this is not an original original idea – it is part of a long tradition. Rightly, My year of rest and relaxation feels almost timeless, despite its almost contemporary setting.The cover, featuring a portrait of Jacques-Louis David in 1798 of a languid young woman, evokes the vintage concept of distinguished idleness, just like the sound track. "I'm just taking a little free time, "says the narrator to Reva at the beginning of the book. The framing goes back to a not-so-distant era when the upper class ladies only dressed for meals and complained of their boredom, and when they were often prescribed rest remedies for months for psychological disorders. like depression.

This kind of feminine privilege was, of course, a gilded prison. Staying in a playful hobby, as accessories for reporting wealth and status of a husband, prevented women from defending their own interests or pursuing invigorating work. These rest cures, immortalized in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's " The Yellow Wallpaper ," were not always voluntary and could be little more than a psychological torture. But compared to other roles available to women, such as a back-breaking work life interspersed with maternity, idleness was surely preferable

Rest and Relaxation the narrator's mother, a beauty queen who married young after Also, she became pregnant during long periods of sleep, while her father, a much older teacher, was supporting the family and that a housekeeper was busy doing chores . "I could argue my mother's rejection of domesticity as a feminist assertion of her right to leisure," the narrator wonders, "but I think that she refused to cook and clean because" she thought it would cement her failure as a beauty queen. "Her mother sucked in a certain level of decorative idleness; stripped to be decorative, she clings to idleness.

Moshfegh certainly does not seem to make a feminist case for leisure, any more than her narrator, who is comfortably aware of her own good fortune. ("Compared to me," she thinks of her best friend, "[Reva] was" underprivileged ".) She does not try to justify her rest as an empowering through out-of-context quotes from Audre Lorde . She does not wallow about it either, even though Reva tells her that she would like to take some free time to "hang out, watch movies, and rest all day … I just have not this luxury. "

The alienated characters populate all the stories of Moshfegh – the thwarted chore of Eileen the cynical outsiders of Homesick for Another World . This languidly adorable heroine, monied, is unusual for her, though her cruelty with flat humor is familiar.

Reva, a college classmate who the narrator always sees from habit but views with pure disdain, is a classic Moshfegh character: despicably basic, suspiciously emotional, grotesquely normal. Reva is a fighter who "came from Long Island, was an 8 out of 10, but called herself" a New York three "and had a major in economics." The narrator recoils before the anxiety of her friend's class and her quest for status. his messy grief over his mother, who is dying of cancer. She sniffs at the thought of Reva ending each night "probably drunk and full of Aspartame and Pepcid." In the morning, she prepared and set off to the world, a mask of calm. I had problems? "

Reva, by any definition, is just getting out of it; The narrator rebels herself, as she imagines

self-destructive and semi-suicidal as the narrator puts it, it is expected that My Year of Rest and Relaxation become a warning and idle hands doing the work of the devil. Instead, her self-medication – which she herself treated with a veiled suspicion – turns out to be effective

. While his pharmaceutical hibernation seems hardly safe or healthy (his own mother died after mixing pills with alcohol), disconnecting from work, news and social obligations while sleeping a lot seems to be a good recipe for de-stressing As I read, I struggled with spasms of bitterness. To take a year's sleep and get rid of all my baggage seemed glorious: to give to my mind and body exactly what they ask, without shame or fear, and let them heal themselves

. and stimulation is available, even in fiction, only to a rarefied handful. If the self-treatment of the narrator works, so what? It's like learning a cure for cancer has been discovered and it costs $ 50 million. For the average patient, it's not a relief to know that the cure is there when there is no hope of accessing it.

But My Year of Rest and Relaxation is by no means a prescription: it's a strange exploration of how the class dictates the degree to which we can take care of ourselves, and the extent to which we must incessantly engage ourselves with a world that beats our souls.