Ottessa Moshfegh Ruined My Life.
My Freshman Honors Thesis
Foreword
When I read My Year of Rest and Relaxation for the first time, it ruined me. Like every other 17-year-old girl, TikTok hype is what pushed me to pick it up in the first place. I read it over the course of a week, stopping periodically and evaluating whether or not I wanted to finish it. I found the protagonist deeply insufferable, but not in a way that was beneficial to the satire. She was just a cunt, which would be perfectly fine if she wasn’t also racist and fatphobic. When I finally finished that horrific last page and closed the book, I was filled with regret, dread, and deep deep sadness. That final scene was so horrific, Reva falling from her death during 9/11 while the protagonist watches it like a pre-recorded sermon. The protagonist experiencing a transcendent climax while watching her best friend die a ridiculously violent death. It made perpetually me nauseous.
From this point forward the novel burrowed itself into the folds of my brain and never left. It made a permanent home in my mind, it consumed my thoughts, it sucked blood from my veins to fuel its deep evil. When I slept at night I tossed and turned thinking why? Who would do this?
Who would write such an awful book about an awful woman, then advertise it to young impressionable girls, priming them to grow into awful women? The feeling troubled me deeply, and it didn’t help that I saw her everywhere. When I rode the train there was a young woman reading Elieen, when I opened my TikTok all I saw were girls my age anticipating the release of her next novel Lapanova. She became a beacon for hatred and negativity in my life, I wanted nothing but to be rid of her. The only way I knew to cope with this feeling was to try and figure her out. I had to determine for myself what her deal was. I read more of her work, Eileen, Death in Her Hands, all with similar racist and bigoted undertones but nothing as bad as My Year of Rest. I read countless reviews and watched even more interviews, but nothing would rid me of that feeling. That pit in the bottom of my stomach stirred every time I saw her name. Critics loved her, and white girls who hated their mothers worshiped her, but I knew that that novel was awful and its effects would be dangerous.
Jump forward a little less than a year—February of 2023. I was fighting monstrous demons with my honors thesis. My professor thought my original idea was finicky. I didn’t agree with him, but I had to pass the class and didn’t have the energy to fight him, so I pivoted. Two months into the research process I scrapped my original idea (which I hope to return to one day) and figured something else out. As I scrambled for something better to devote my research to, that awful feeling washed over me once more. The dread, the regret, the fear of this novel's effects in the wake of Moshfegh's widespread acclaim. I decided that once and for all I was going to figure it out. I was going to dissect every layer of the disdain I felt in a way that was coherent and readable. If I didn’t figure it out now, it’d never stop haunting me. Every time I saw her name in a bookstore or one of her novels hanging out of some annoying person's tote bag I’d feel that awfulness again. I had to take matters into my own hands.
I present to you the fruits of my labor. Three months, thirty pages, and many many tears later, I’ve finally figured out that awful feeling. I wish I could say that once I typed the final word, all the weight disappeared off my shoulders and I was able to breathe again. In a way it did, I felt clarity, but not relief. I had done what I’d set out to do, I understood my feelings of confusion and fear, but it didn’t make it go away. I’m not sure of exactly what it would take for me to feel that. Maybe me and Moshfegh will just have to be lifelong enemies. I’m ok with that.
If you're looking for a breezy afternoon read, I suggest taking a browse through the short story section and coming back a little later. And if you're an avid Moshfegh fan, I suggest close reading and taking plenty of notes. This is the first research paper of this magnitude I’ve ever written, and coming from a high school where we read one novel a year, this is probably the third research paper I’ve ever written. I had a lot to learn along the way, and a lot of slack to pick up being deeply disadvantaged in research writing. I didn’t realize how much of a challenge it would be, it took a lot more rewriting, rereading, and re-editing than I anticipated. I spent a lot of time re-evaluating my own skill set, and determining how to use the skills I did have to my advantage in this paper. I can’t say whether or not I enjoyed the process, I learned so much about myself as a writer and an academic, but I also lost so much sleep I might never rest easy again. I’m very proud of the final project but this paper almost drove me insane so I feel like I can’t fully enjoy it. If I can’t enjoy it, I hope you can. And if you don’t enjoy it please do not tell me.
