on a year of unrest and unrelaxation
My taste in books varies wildly, but I’ve always had an affinity for the morosely and frankly honest. Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis - problematic I know - is one of my favorites, so is Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose. Those books are more mood-driven than plot-driven. Less Than Zero makes me want to sit out by a summer pool sipping rum & cokes and getting sundrunk. Too Much and Not the Mood makes me want to sit in a stark white apartment poring through old issues of The Atlantic while The Strokes play. So I’m all about a literary mood. Maybe that’s why I took to My Year of Rest and Relaxation so well. The unnamed protagonist is a numb, pretty & wealthy young white woman with dead parents. After her mother dies she decides to sleep through an entire year with the help of prescription pills from her remarkably cavalier psychiatrist.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation makes me want to hole up and watch the world destruct. Oh wait, that’s happening...ha. if there was ever a year to sleep through, it was 2020. The book’s grim in that the protagonist is an orphan with no real family, no real friends (save for an ex-college roommate that she merely tolerates) and no real desire to feed herself. Literally and figuratively. The protagonist develops routines of watching Whoopi Goldberg movies on VHS, going to the local bodega for coffees, and online shopping while in an unconscious haze. I built routines too, good and bad. The good: a smoothie for breakfast every morning, taking daily summertime walks, collaging my old disposable prints into a scrapbook after my nightly shower.
The bad: catastrophizing after every grocery store visit, spending entire Sundays in bed, half-awake and numbed by my vices, falling asleep while Netflix plays season one of You or Girlfriends. I am neither white nor rich nor orphan nor disaffected from the world. But maybe 2020 has been my year of rest and relaxation too. I’ve been home more than ever. The “rest” is the homebodiness, the “relaxation” is indulging in herbs, in wine, in unnecessary Go Puff orders. This was the year to give myself a damn break. And I think that’s what My Year of Rest and Relaxation’s protagonist does. Grief is a wild, many-faced thing. She wanted to sleep through hers. How many of us, if given the chance, would have gone to bed in March and set an alarm for Jan 1st, 2021?