In 1987, Michael Jackson’s album Bad was released. Shortly thereafter, I acquired the vinyl record and listened to it over and over, with rapture, watching the record spin on the player in my bedroom and gaping at the sounds coming out of it.

Even as a girl who hadn’t yet graduated from elementary school, I had strong opinions about that album—namely, that it was great. There are no loser songs there. I still think that today, more than 30 years later.

In those pre-Internet days when it was difficult to preview music before buying it, I acquired many other albums that I would not describe as, shall we say, thrillers. Perhaps you, like me, remember hearing a song on the radio and buying the full album, only to be disappointed by every song recorded by the artist other than the one that initially charmed you into a purchase.

In other words, one hit does not a true artist make. I’ve found—not just in music but also in books, clothing brands, cliques of people, and card games—that one article is not enough for one to make a judgement call on the entire set, regarding either type or quality.

Have you ever shown up at a party where you know no one but the host, only to realize that you can’t stand any of the host’s friends, even though he or she is one of your favorite people in the world?

I don’t know Ottessa Moshfegh, but I think she has a cool name—which has been popping up a lot lately in the literary-type magazines I read. According to Wikipedia, she is from Boston, her mom is from Croatia, and her dad is Jewish and from Iran. I greatly enjoyed her novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation; I found it unique and interesting.

As this is the one and only work by her that I have read, I am having trouble conceptualizing her as an artist. Does she usually write about young, troubled women, circa 2000, who try extremely hard to sleep their lives away? I checked out all of her other books from the library. They are sitting right here: in a nice little stack. I would like to tear through them; but then, I have several other stacks of books lying around that are equally enticing, and I would like to tear through those, too. And then there are all the other things I need and want to do in life.

What good and bad experiences have you had in encountering a one and only representative—and then getting to know its fellows?

Sleep. That place to which we all disappear for hours at a time. Drifting off. The mysterious and intangible loss of consciousness. The strangeness of dreams. Waking refreshed . . . or not so much.

As a kid, I was scared of the loss of consciousness that is implicit and inevitable in falling sleep. As an adult, I have, at times, felt even more afraid of the continuity of consciousness that is implicit and inevitable in being awake.

The protagonist of the novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh, falls into the latter camp. She does not want to experience life. She wants to fade away, to live in the darkest shadows, where she cannot be found—not by anyone, and especially not by herself:

“And that was exactly what I wanted—my emotions passing like headlights that shine softly through a window, sweep past me, illuminate something vaguely familiar, then fade and leave me in the dark again.”

The protagonist adores sleep like nothing else in life. That is a very oxymoronic stance to take. Sleeping, she does not exist. Waking, she fetishizes sleep:

“The bed was a king, low to the ground, and whenever I slept in it, I felt very far away from the world, like I was in a spaceship or on the moon. I missed that bed. The stiff blankness of my mother’s eggshell sheets.”

I am currently coming out of a period of “rest and relaxation” myself. Over the past few years, I have experienced a variety of physical and mental health issues that I am treating with wellness activities . . . and prescription drugs. My doctor recently changed the dosages when I explained that I was sleeping too much at night, sleepy throughout the day, and struggling to get things done. The past couple weeks have been a wonderful period of awakening. And yet, I remember the great relief I felt upon descending, initially, into the sleepiness that would rescue me from my ailments.

One could, I suppose, judge those who use drugs that cause them to descend into sleep as somehow lacking in the vitals of life. Perhaps I and Moshfegh’s protagonist—and I may as well add Juliet and Romeo—are poor, broken, creatures who cannot sustain the light of consciousness as naturally given to us. Or perhaps, as in the case of Rip Van Winkle, intoxicating ourselves to sleep is something that just happens to some of us, beyond our control and comprehension.

Are you feeling sleepy?

I recently discovered a very cool chain of restaurants that are also bookstores in Washington, D.C. While in the city for another reason, I popped into one of the locations to check it out. As promised, the entrance of the restaurant was a little bookshop!

Delighted, I began to scan the book titles, pick out a few of them, and flip through the pages. However, this seemingly simple task was not very simple in regard to all of the books in the little lobby area. The fiction was arranged on a tall and thin bookshelf, and the top two shelves were beyond my reach. No ladder was in sight. As a writer of fiction with a last name beginning with A, I felt empathetic toward those poor beginning-of-the-alphabet authors whose books were languishing up there.

I could have taken the hard route. I could have tracked down an employee and requested access. But I was just browsing, not requesting a particular book. I didn’t want to ask an employee to bring me down all of them, or even some of them, only to promptly ask for them to be put back, or (worse) buy them out of guilt.

So I took the easy route. I browsed through only the middle- and end-of-the-alphabet authors’ books, ultimately buying the novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh.

This is a book about taking the easy route.

The protagonist, in response to distressing experiences and events both relatively recent and long ago, decides to gift herself what she calls her “year of rest and relaxation.” Her idea of rest and relaxation is taking enough psychotropic drugs to sleep away as many hours of her life as possible. She has the resources to do this, due to both an inheritance and, as the book jacket puts it, “one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature.”

This is a very funny book. The protagonist’s perspective and ideas are so wild that they shocked me into laughter many times. Other times, they shocked me into sadness as I had realizations about the nature of upsetting experiences, the long fallout of inadequate support during childhood, and how people cope in less-than-ideal circumstances. I was never sure whether to admire the protagonist’s resilience, or recoil from her careless and flippant attitude toward herself and others.

Sometimes, the author seems to be saying, we protect ourselves from the difficulties of the hard route . . . by working very hard to take the easy route. But it’s interesting that the protagonist sets a limit on the easy route. She commits to transitioning back to the hard route after one year. She seems to intuitively know that she needs to escape into sleep for a very long time . . . but not forever. I’ll let you read the book to learn how the plan works out for her. (It’s a page-turner, from start to finish!)

Are you taking the easy route in some aspect of your life? Do you have plans to transition to the hard route?