My Year of Rest and Relaxation: In Defense of Beautiful Women Who Suffer

So what if she's a pill popping liar? Psychoanalyzing the characters of one of today's most discussed books.

The narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation finds solace in her narcissism, this is because one of two things. One, she doesn’t have many emotions, certainly not empathy. And two, she finds it so painfully difficult to deal with the emotions she does have, that she finds it impossible to care about anyone else’s feelings.

When I first read My Year of Rest and Relaxation two years ago, I thought the main character was a psychotic, unreliable narrator who simply didn’t care about anyone but herself (and I still gave it five stars). While reading it for the second time last month, I realized this woman’s got the beautiful, resting bitch face that even the nicest person could hide behind. I thought she was some emotionless brat, simply looking to sleep for a year. The personality she presents to people is one that is unlikeable, but as I was re reading it, I realized that it’s because she’s never tried to be anything more than just a pretty face. Being judged like a book by its cover is what she knows best.

I hear a constant uproar on the internet criticizing the narrator’s selfishness and nihilistic outlook on life, but don’t people understand that the mentally deranged tend to lack ambition and the ability to care? So what if the narrator who has no name can’t possibly focus on her best friend Reva’s grief over her mother’s death, or her unwanted pregnancy from a married man? So what if all she notices about her best friend is the fact that she’s jealous of her thinness? The girl has some grief of her own she’s trying to stuff down by dosing her insides with countless drugs. In the eyes of a grieving, spoiled, 26-year-old women, when all you have is your early 2000’s upper east side apartment and an annoying best friend, which one would you rather spend time with? I’m joking, of course! I actually enjoyed Reva’s character much more than I did the main character. The public consensus on the characters of this novel is that Reva deserved a better friend and a better story. And while I have to agree with that, I think that people don’t understand that the entire premise of Reva’s character was to show us how the narrator truly thinks and feels. Reva is the only person that causes the narrator to feel, which is why she can’t stand to be around Reva.

I don’t think most readers understand just how difficult it is for our main character to even process the concept of feelings, seeing as neither her mother nor her father seemed to have any. They never showed interest in her life, never expected anything of her and never gave her the tools to identify her emotions, much less how to deal with them. When her father dies, the main character cries because she doesn’t want to be left alone with her mother! This wasn’t out of love for her father, but rather the pain of losing her lesser of two evils parent. No wonder she doesn’t care to comfort Reva once Reva’s mother dies, she doesn’t understand the bond that children usually have with their mothers. Instead of being there for her friend, she complains the entire time she is at the funeral and instead judges Reva’s family and their house, she demands that Reva finds a place for her to rest and her dead mother’s clothes to borrow. Could anyone be more sadistic? This isn’t out of hatred or indifference towards Reva, but rather disdain for what Reva represents and brings out of her.

Prime examples of the narrator being unable to understand / deal with her emotions:

“I could think of feelings, emotions, but I couldn’t bring them up in me. I couldn’t even locate where my emotions came from. My brain? It made no sense. Irritation was what I knew best, a heaviness on my chest, a vibration in my neck like my head was revving up before it would rocket off my body… Was sadness the same kind of thing? Was joy? Was longing? Was love?”

“I sensed Reva’s misery in the room with me. It was the particular sadness of a young woman who lost her mother, complex and angry and soft, yet oddly hopeful. I recognized it, but I didn’t feel it inside of me. The sadness was just floating around the air.”

Examples of the emotions Reva brings out of her:

“Seeing Reva in full-blown Reva mode both delighted and disgusted me. Her repression, her transparent denial, her futile attempts to tap into the pain with me in the car, it all satisfied me somehow. Reva scratched at an itch that, on my own, I couldn’t reach.”

“Watching her take what was deep and real and painful and ruin it by expressing it with such trite precision gave me reason to think Reva was an idiot, and therefore I could discount her pain and with it, mine. Reva was like the pills I took. They turned everything, even hatred, even love, into fluff I could bat away”.

It is sadistic in a way, enjoying the pain she causes Reva. I believe this is not only because for once, she is able to feel something other than unpleasantness, but also because this is the most emotion she has ever felt about anyone. The good, the bad, the ugly, understanding Reva’s role is integral to seeing past the bitchy, conceited surface of the narrator. Many people do not enjoy this book simply because they don’t understand it, they don’t understand what it’s like to feel both nothing and everything.

I, like the book, wanted this review to be plotless. So if this review isn’t congruent in its conclusion, it’s because the book itself never reached a real conclusion. You read the ending and wonder what the point of trying to sleep for a year was, especially when she really only ends up consistently sleeping for 3 to 4 months. What I do know is that the little emotions she dealt with her so unpleasant and foreign to her, she simply couldn’t pretend to be a pleasant person to be around in the midst of her anguish. Sleeping for a year was meant to rejuvenate and rewire, and that she did. I understand that by no physical means did the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation suffer, but you have to think that mental torture this woman went through had to have been so horrific, she chose sleeping for a year over living.

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