Amazingly, considering all the chaos and sadness that has happened here over the last 12 months, My Year of Rest and Relaxation is the 30th book I’ve managed to read this year. I might just sneak one more in before 2025 if I possibly can. I’m working on a post for next week so I thought I’d share this wonderful book by an author I’d never read before.
By the way. WordPress has just sent me a happy anniversary notification telling me I did my first ever post here, 6 years today! Time flies and all that. Anyway . . .
First published in 2018, this book was (and deservedly still is) an incredible global success.
Stubbornly I didn’t buy it at the time because everyone was all over it (and I was also probably furiously attempting to begin blogging in WordPress for the first time). Also, I hated the original cover with a passion. But things change, just like life, taste, underwear, and book covers.
It’s the year 2000. Our unnamed narrator is blessed with the physical DNA of the gods: young, impossibly beautiful and adored by men and women alike. She’s intelligent, street-wise, smart, and lives in her expensive apartment in Manhattan. Everything is paid for by the inheritance from her dead parents. She has everything a human could possibly desire, apart from happiness. She wants out. She wants to sleep.
She decides to opt out of the everyday facade of life – the mindless chatter of Smalltalk, the fake veneer of the rich and wannabe rich, the dating, the bad sex, the good sex, the inconvenient deaths, and shitty lives of everyone around her. She wants to pull the plug for a year, then she can reevaluate her life.
Enter the very off-kilter and shamanic quack, Dr Tuttle. She offers terrible medical advice but is willing to offer every drug under the sun for cash. Our narrator decides she will never find another ‘professional’ as irresponsible and weird as the drug-pushy Dr Tuttle, and sees her as the only hope to her year-long oblivion.
She loses her job at the art gallery because of all the naps taken in the utility cupboard. She leaves her crappy boss a ‘present’ like no other.
Pills are popped like toxic candy. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she watches VHS tapes of terrible films. She idolises Whoopi Goldberg. Her long-suffering friend, Reva is her only visitor. Bulimic, materialistic and stuck in a bad relationship, Reva babbles away about her terrible life. Although our narrator treats her like garbage, she is oddly soothed by her whining, sisterly presence.
Eventually, Dr Tuttle prescribes the drug Infermiterol, and the rest and Relaxation descends into a zombified, blackout chaos of not knowing what went on: the night, the day, or the week before. But eventually, the sleep finally comes.
If you took the murders out of Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, you wouldn’t be a million miles away from the satirical nihilism of this book. The sarcasm, cruelty and the black humour are high here. Oddly, I found the last chapter quite heartbreaking.
Ottessa Moshfegh is an incredibly engaging and gifted writer. She renders her off-the-wall and unlikable characters beautifully on the page. Razor sharp and biting. Moshfegh does gallows humour exceptionally well (actually, she’s hilarious). Now I need to read more of her work. Highly recommended!
It’s been a while. Two years! That’s a hell of a long time to be away from here. A lot has happened – plenty hasn’t. But I guess the main thing, the whole reason I started all this random rambling here in the first place many moons ago, is . . .
I’m now 6 years, 7 months, and 9 days sober (I don’t count the days, I prod my trusty sober app). So, that happened. Yep, still hanging in there.
The last actual post I wrote in here (aside from the more recent book rambles) was 17th November 2022. I’ve totalled fifty-one posts in six years. Hardly prolific by any stretch of the imagination. It could have been a lot more but poof! I disappeared. So why the gap when everything seemed to be going so well here?
The honest answer is the same as always, I let life get in the way. It’s still getting in the way and it always will, but I may as well be here, in good company and write about how, when, where, and why it’s getting in the way. It’s kind of the whole point of blogging, isn’t it? I need to remember that. So why come back to WordPress, babbling into the ether again?
I missed it. Thinking, writing, creating graphics, uploading, sharing, and commenting were a big part of my life here for a while.
I would have been back much sooner but for two reasons:
1: The trusty WordPress app I was using for these posts was informing me to change to the new Jetpack app. When I was considering coming back, not only had I completely forgotten how to use the original WordPress software that I once confidently navigated in my sleep, I had to move over to another software and not know how to use that either. Of course, there were conflicts, issues, glitches, missing images, missing this–that–and–the other. Slowly, I finally got my head around everything and began finding my way around again. Things began to make sense. I’m still blindly navigating my way around, but it’s getting better.
I began reading and checking through all my old posts again. Holy shit!
2: So yeah, the old posts. That was an eye-opener. Reading through them again had me tempted to delete the whole site and begin again from scratch. To say I winced, squirmed, and cringed is a huge understatement. I didn’t recognise the person writing it. Seemingly arrogant statements began revealing themselves as I scrolled. Declarations such as ‘I never give advice on this site but . . .’ Then I give advice. Onward to the rushed and ridiculous attempts at poetry – sheesh. The recovery memes (word noodles as I called them) Jesus. The anger, the frustration, the overconfidence, the self-deprecation, all wrapped around an annoying cockiness that I was finding hard to bear as I reread it all. But I stayed away from the delete button and slept on it for a night or two.
I began to think back to who I was, where I had come from, what I had lost. The few hopes and dreams I still had, and the extremely low expectations that I could ever get (let alone stay) sober. What I was actually reading were the words of a terrified little human who was trying everything in his power to make amends with a ragged life. A person trying desperately to fight his addiction with everything he had. The (not so poetic) poetry, the self-made recovery memes, the overconfidence, and self-deprecation was all he had at the time. All in the hope that it would work out and eventually come good.
Well, it worked out!
At the time, every single word of every post was a lifesaver. I had somewhere to go in my head, something to do. They helped get me through some crisis/event or other: a minute, a day, a week, a month – birthdays, bank holidays and the very dreaded Christmas period. Blogging in here helped me. Most were written on a bus either going to, or coming back from a recovery meeting, group, or rehab. Every word at the time was important – to me. So, rereading everything in here brought me back down to earth. Instead of judging my old self, wincing and squirming in my seat, I was proud of myself.
But! Before I could even contemplate starting this all again with the aim of people reading my new posts and possibly scrolling through older ones, there was another huge hurdle to overcome. The horrific, unfathomable, and indecipherable writing needed sorting out. Wow! That isn’t me judging myself, it was awful.
You don’t need to be a literary genius to write a decent blog post, and I’m no literary gymnast. But you do, at the very least, have to make sense. You know, so people can read and understand what the hell you’re talking about. I took a big breath and began repairing, deleting, adding, rearranging, editing, and re-editing every single post, right from the very beginning. Also, many images had to be resized because they were enormous data vacuums that slowed the site down. Some were replaced. Most of the posts didn’t have a featured image, so I created new ones from scratch – I don’t know if I needed to but I enjoyed the process and carried on anyway.
I started all that in the beginning of August this year. It took some time. Right at the end of all that, when I finally finished editing the last post, my mum sadly passed away. But that’s a subject for another time – maybe. Maybe not. But I’m finally back here.
I haven’t done a total hatchet job to the old posts. In fact, if anyone who has read them before and has the energy to reread them again, the only difference I’d hope they would notice is that they are now coherent and make sense. I’ve taken many things out, but also left a lot in. I didn’t want to ruin the spirit of the original posts. Things are left in there because that’s what came out at the time (as tempting as it is to hit delete now in 2024). Me and my older self, compromised. It seems to have worked out well.
But I completely understand why the posts were chaotic at times. They were written in a cycle of excitement, hope and terror. I was taking my sobriety seriously for the first time in my life. If I had an idea for a post, it came out with enthusiastic urgency. They were written in hurried spurts, maybe checked once or twice (without really checking), a flick through my phone for a graphic and Bam! Uploaded and published online. Onto the next post or idea. I simply wanted to move forward as fast as I could with what I had at the time. Everything seemed urgent, demanding to come out there and then. It felt good, achieving something in tandem with my sobriety. Also, (as if getting sober isn’t enough), obviously I wanted to save every addict in the world because I was doing well. I had words of wisdom, and obviously every addict in the world was reading my wobbly WordPress blog of insightful genius, right? It’s a lovely, deluded thought but . . .
Yeah. Anyway. Time and tide calm most things down. Sometimes to a complete halt, poof!
So those are some of the rhymes and reasons for why I disappeared and returned, that you never asked, thought, or cared about in the first place.
But there they are and here I am, again. Sorry about that.
So, what now? Will this continue be an addiction/recovery/writing blog with some book reviews and possibly some of my fiction thrown in now and again? It’s why it all began in the first place. I guess the answer is yes, for now. Will I still be asking myself annoying, rhetorical questions throughout every post and answering them? What do you think? Yes, I think I will.
But I promise not to inflict any more poetry attempts or recovery memes on you. Feel free to sigh with relief, whoever you are.
Who are you? Maybe you are actually me, and all my old and new words are actually yours truly, sorting things out and making sense of things – talking to myself again. Possibly that is the real reason why I’m back – just another place to ramble, question, and argue with myself. I’ll take that.
But if you are actually, you and not actually me – hello! Feel free to join in, or not.
To anyone who said nice things way-back-when, regarding my old posts – thank you so much. You were very kind, and made a quaking, hopeful wreck very happy. I can’t promise a massive improvement from now on, but hopefully from 2024 onward my nonsense will make sense (if that makes sense).
I’ll be here next week with either a book review or a post. But I’ll be here, saying something about something, or other. Sorry about that.
Stumbling Towards Hindsight 