Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes

“During her freshman year in college, both of her parents died—first her father from cancer, then her mother in a suicide caused by an interaction between psychiatric medications and alcohol.”

″ Now living on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and increasingly dissatisfied with her post-collegiate life, the narrator finds a conveniently incompetent psychiatrist, Dr. Tuttle.”

“The unnamed narrator, a slender and beautiful blonde from a wealthy WASP family, is a recent graduate of Columbia University, where she majored in art history. ”

“Her college roommate Reva (who unabashedly envies the narrator’s wealth and appearance) makes frequent unannounced visits, which the narrator allows despite her disdain for Reva’s social climbing and annoyance at having to listen to Reva’s problems—her own mother’s terminal cancer, a frustrating affair with her married boss.”

“It is set in New York City in 2000 and 2001 and follows an unnamed protagonist as she gradually escalates her use of prescription medications in an attempt to sleep for an entire year.”

“Dr. Tuttle, who freely prescribes a variety of sleeping, anti-anxiety, and anti-psychotic medications for the insomnia the narrator reports as her complaint.”

″ In fact, the narrator hopes to spend as few hours awake as possible, lulling herself with pills and middlebrow movies she plays on repeat on her VCR, until the aging machine breaks down.”

“When the narrator is fired from her job in an art gallery, she chooses to live off unemployment payments and her inheritance, while attempting to sleep for a year in an effort to reset her life. But her “year of rest and relaxation” is regularly interrupted.”

“The narrator is also occasionally in contact with an older boyfriend, Trevor (a banker who works in the World Trade Center), though he frequently cuts off their relationship to date women his own age, returning when one of them has dumped him or occasionally in response to the narrator’s pleading.

“The narrator initially makes trips out of her apartment only to a local bodega, Dr. Tuttle’s office, and the Rite Aid to fill her prescriptions. But as she takes stronger and stronger medications, she begins leaving the apartment in her sleep, among other things to go to nightclubs.”