David Davis 42, part 5
on rest and relaxation
Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4
(I can sort of gloss over Ottessa Moshfegh’s OCD lit without getting carried away, right? Right.)
In 2018, when my friend Tyler Ford gave me an ARC of Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, its premise provoked a nostalgia that, while painful, was so specific it was almost cozy. I have, let’s say, little in common with the book’s nameless narrator, a beautiful, orphaned, post-grad WASP working in a Manhattan art gallery in 2001, save her desire to put herself in chemical hibernation for a year in hopes of becoming “a person who lives in the world instead of constantly fantasizing about removing herself from it,” as Jia Tolentino writes in her New Yorker review.
While I never pulled off my own fantasy, which I won’t describe here in order to preserve my dignity1, Moshfegh’s narrator does. Without spoiling any more than is warranted, My Year’s ending isn’t exactly a happy one, but its protagonist’s goals are more or less attained. To use Bush 2’s phrasing, which went what we would now call viral two years after the events of My Year: Mission Accomplished.
When I pivot to less-than-magical language to nutshell My Year’s narrative—that our WASP has self-diagnosed and then healed her own adrenal fatigue, albeit in a way that is most generously described as experimental—I don’t do so to undermine her fantasy, or the relief that it brings her. Like many of Moshfegh’s protagonists, our narrator takes a ruthlessly practical approach to an old existential problem, “the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to,” as the Bard says.
Tranquil though the surface may be, the flat water of emptiness all but disappears the submarine boil of rage, sadness, and grief. With her magical pills, our narratrix improves upon the methods of her mother (suicide by OD) with this simple innovation: why die when you can sleep?
When I write about fantasy, my focus is often on sex and (sexual) desire. This is because I’m interested in these things, and because you are, and because so much of our notion of the sensual is sexualized. I have no doubt that we’ve the capacity for sensuality without sexuality (and vice versa), but because former is so rarely legible except through the latter (and vice versa), even I sometimes miss the forest for the trees. I guess this is my way of saying that this post is the result of my having made a point of writing at least one installment of this series on a fantasy that’s not explicitly or primarily sexual.
In Part 1 of this series, I wrote, “we’re not looking at mere fantasy, here, but fantasy remembered, refracted, even regretted.” As I said, my own private year of rest and relaxation never came to pass; a sort of inversion of My Year’s plot, that redacted yearning was just death drive, man. Now that I have a reason to live, my fantasies have been appropriately downsized. My week of rest and relaxation, where no one dies and healthcare is free, has insanely delicious vibes, doesn’t it?
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