my year of rest and relaxation
a playlist curated by katherine behm, in honor of my year of rest and relaxation by otessa moshfegh.
The once beautiful Boston fall is slowly turning into the wet and chilling pre-winter. I think the mundaneness of life is starting to get to all of us along with the usual dreaded thoughts that come when the sky turns dark before 4pm. Everyday I take my usual commute to my dinner shift at work. Meanwhile, all I want to do is catch the next T back home and lock myself inside forever. Which is a great reminder of one of my favorite books.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh is both one of the most relatable and truthful yet absurd books on womanhood to come out in the past decade. The book follows our nameless narrator as she attempts to sleep for a whole year, with the help of her odd psychiatrist and his endless stream of prescription pills given. While she has a picturesque life: an apartment on the upper east side of Manhattan, a trust fund to last decades, and a job at one of the most sought after art galleries in the city, she falls into a state of depression I feel lots of us relate to. While her choice of sleeping the year away is crazed, isn’t it something we all wish for at one point or another?
Whenever I read a book I love, I crave the story in whichever way possible. Endlessly searching through Tik Tok for more people who want to talk about it to completely envelop myself in the novel. Which is when I began creating playlists to build upon an already existing fictional world. Music is such a powerful tool and for books, it can make the experience of reading an even more immersive one. This playlist, I put together songs that either represent the character or would live in the universe of the story.
It is getting dark again, so I'm going to get back to listening to the playlist and continue reading on, but you let me know: do you think darker stories like this are comforting or feeding into the darkness more?
I guess that’s for you to listen and decide...
