This is, without hyperbole or exaggeration, one of the best romance novels that I’ve ever read. One of those books you buy in paperback and reach, reaThis is, without hyperbole or exaggeration, one of the best romance novels that I’ve ever read. One of those books you buy in paperback and reach, reach, and reach for until they are tattered and yellowed and full of scribbled notes, which is to say, until they are well-loved.
If you had told me that a romance novel about a baseball player and the reporter begrudgingly covering his story would so thoroughly change the landscape of my life in less than two days, I would have said... yep, actually, that sounds about right. More seriously, I loved this book. Set in 1960s New York, You Should Be So Lucky speaks with insistence and quiet intensity to the beautiful density of queer existence, caught up in a world that refuses to accommodate it. Amidst so much unfreedom, the characters in this book build beautiful capacious lives and affirm the tenacity of queer love and the sustaining power of queer community against the routine brutalities of state-sanctioned homophobia and the scripted histories of death, violence, and uprooting. You might be forced to endure subjugation, the novel says, but that does not mean only living life as a subjugated person. And that—well, that hit home.
You Should Be So Lucky is also a deeply moving depiction of grief that refuses to relegate its dead characters to a numb aside, asking us instead to sit with the vast helplessness of mourning someone you're not allowed to love and thus not allowed to grieve. How do you build yourself out of such mourning? How do you begin to heal? This is a novel that is just so utterly kind and generous to its queer characters that I was left feeling nothing so much as grateful for it.
I cheered so hard for the characters� happiness. I believed in their belonging to one another and wanted so desperately for them to believe it too. I cried a lot, but I screamed joyfully even more. Please read it for yourself....more
This was an intensely emotional ride. Reading romantic queer stories set in the past (the 1950s in tCat Sebastian, I was not familiar with your game.
This was an intensely emotional ride. Reading romantic queer stories set in the past (the 1950s in this case) always gets to me. I’m reminded that queer people have loved and grieved and fought and survived through a world that never ceased to want us dead. I wanted to reach into the page and give both Rick and Andy a hug. ...more
I think the best books force themselves into our minds and make a quiet disturbance there. They strike something in us, and even if we don’t fully undI think the best books force themselves into our minds and make a quiet disturbance there. They strike something in us, and even if we don’t fully understand it, we feel altered in some strange and irrevocable way.
It is hard to know what to make of My Year of Rest and Relaxation and its narrator. I inhaled the story in two quick sittings and found myself afterwards in something of a daze. My mind was spinning, a compass without a lodestone, and no matter how much I held up my feelings to the light, I could not decide if I were feeling bereft that it was over, or simply relieved.
The narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a rich, orphaned, conventionally beautiful WASP in her twenties who hopes to annihilate her past and emerge an improved version of herself by devoting an entire year to nothing but sleep. To ensure this transformation, she dopes herself up on prescription and over-the-counter drugs. In her waking hours, she makes regular visits to the street corner bodega, to the drug store, and less regular ones to Dr. Tuttle for the purpose of restocking her supply of pharmaceuticals. She watches popular movies from the 90s (ideally starring Harrison Ford or Whoopi Goldberg), and endures visits from her “best friend� Reva who drinks, worries about being skinny, makes herself vomit, and recites hollow-eyed feel-good self-help slogans.
This is the baffling premise on which My Year of Rest and Relaxation depends, and Moshfegh makes little effort to rationalize it. Instead, the novel records this process of self-creation—what the narrator describes as her “hibernation”—which (at its most destructive) amounts to a total disavowal of the past, a kind of self-obliteration. Our narrator wants to slough off her past self like old dead skin, and re-emerge into the world more sharply herself. As a possibility, this effort is frightening, but—a little exhilarating too. The longing is that our narrator might pack herself into sleep so deeply and for so long that she can never unpack her (old) self again. After a year of “feel[ing] nothing…a blank slate� with “no past or present,� she might raise her head, look into the mirror, and find, reflected back, a completely altered self.
At its heart, this is a novel that reaches to the parts of ourselves that know what it means to live in a world that one does not want, and which one did not choose for themselves, and wanting out. My Year of Rest and Relaxation offers an anti-social way out of such a bind. Our narrator, who “hate[s] talking to people,� is desperate to express this essential loss to the world, a reprieve that neither friends nor lovers can provide. With no past to lean on or learn from, no future can be imagined, and with a present that is entirely occupied with “black emptiness, an infinite space of nothingness,� our narrator’s acts of self-destruction grow and luxuriate unbearably. She does not attempt to reform or repair the broken pieces of her life, or exercise control over them, nor can she stop the past from reemerging. Scenes from her childhood interrupt her hibernation: a cold, unloving family, and later, a sleazy ex-lover and a ruptured intimacy with a friend she keeps hurting needlessly.
A quote from Toni Morrison’s novel, Sula, rose up from some shadowy recess of my mind when I was reading this book: “And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.� The novel’s narrator is an artist without an art form. Her relationship to art, in fact, is one of greatest disillusionment. In one memorable paragraph, our narrator makes an exact and frankly depressing observation about the state of art:
The art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fueled by greed and gossip and cocaine. I might as well have worked on Wall Street. Speculation and opinions drove not only the market but the products, sadly, the values of which were hinged not to the ineffable quality of art as a sacred human ritual—a value impossible to measure, anyway—but to what a bunch of rich assholes thought would “elevate� their portfolios and inspire jealousy and, delusional as they all were, respect. I was perfectly happy to wipe out all that garbage from my mind.
With no art form, no viable outlet for expressing her brokenness, our narrator—in her quest to escape her grief, to be cured of herself and be reborn—simply self-destructs.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation descends into dark places: Moshfegh explores the emotional wreckage of her narrator with a precision both touching and terrifying. There is a liberatory sort of shock to reading about a version of woman that is messy, porous, detestable, cruel, passive, and self-loathing; to transform the novel into a space where that woman is able to bleed and break apart, where she has permission to lose herself and not be wrong. It is that messy rawness of life that makes this novel not just provocative but persuasive as well, a novel that compels the reader into a riskier intimacy, caught up in the strange gravity of a narrator whose acts are both recklessly vulnerable and utterly unforgivable. It also, frankly, puts an unrepentantly horrible narrator in better charity with the reader.
Moshfegh also plays fast and loose with the novel’s traditional plot structure. In a novel of impasse and precarity, such infidelity to plot is required: it gives depth and form to the utter formlessness and trespass of grief. My Year of Rest and Relaxation emphasizes rupture and repetition rather than continuity. There is a sense of unreality to the passage of time in the story: time either moves in stuttering, lumpy pieces, like swimming through syrup, or strangely fast, with a lucidity more terrifying than the narrator’s drug-induced listlessness. It is as though the novel makes the point that time works differently when you’re grieving—or when you’re losing your mind.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation also, crucially, refuses our appetite for resolution. Although the novel ends with a sense of lightness and the spectral possibility of healing, it does not go from “black emptiness� to an ecstatic, devotional appreciation of living. In Central Park, as our narrator watches “life buzz[ing] between each shade of green, from dark pines and supple ferns to lime green moss growing on a huge, dry gray rock,� she tells us that “My sleep had worked. I was soft and calm and felt things. This was good. This was my life now.� Maybe her sleep did work. Or maybe it was the relief of knowing that, whether we are happy or not, the world simply goes on, in a way that predates all of us, and which will certainly outlive us....more
It is both impossible and pointless to try to talk about love. You can put together all the fanciest vocabulary words you know and they’ll still come It is both impossible and pointless to try to talk about love. You can put together all the fanciest vocabulary words you know and they’ll still come up short against the feeling in the pit of your stomach. Love resists all attempts at capture. For love, language is tongue-tied.
David Levithan marshals around 200 words to talk about love. In a series of dictionary entries, from “aberrant� to “zenith�, he records the ferocious rituals of love between a first-person narrator and an unnamed “you.� The entries are tiny explosions of intimacies that explore the devastating movement from tentative beginning to sudden rupture: the collusion, the fall, the intimacy, the distance, the betrayal, the heartbreak, the bargain, the holding and turning away, in a thousand moments, again and again. And the loving, always the loving, fiercely, brokenly, and as if life depends on it.
In these entries, love is fierce and strange and mundane and petty and wonderful and it’s the best and worst place any place can possibly be. Love swings from beauty and loveliness—�cadence, n. (...) there are times when I’m talking to you and I hit a Southern vowel, or a word gets caught in a Southern truncation, and I know it’s because I’m swimming in your cadences, that you permeate my very language”—to pain and sorrow—�catharsis, n. I took it out on the wall. I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU. YOU FUCKER, I LOVE YOU.� The novel risks closeness to look at love in all its lights, to weigh it in all sorts of lexicons, and yet—it can only touch the surface: �ineffable, adj. These words will ultimately end up being the barest of reflections, devoid of the sensations words cannot convey. Trying to write about love is ultimately like trying to have a dictionary represent life. No matter how many words there are, there will never be enough.�
Ultimately, The Lover’s Dictionary is not meant to capture for us what love is, but rather, to testify to the narrator’s experience of having lived it, of having been through it and within it. Love happened, love hurt, and nothing could be more mundane or more extraordinary than that....more
nothing is more earnestly good than to inhabit a moment of pleasure as simply and purely as reading a good romance novel and resurface from it scourednothing is more earnestly good than to inhabit a moment of pleasure as simply and purely as reading a good romance novel and resurface from it scoured of all hurt, with the sense of being afloat on a sea of light and feeling nothing but a peaceful benevolent love towards all.
in Time to Shine Rachel Reid gives us the gift of a real slow-burn: the game of furtive glances and days that pass in confused undivided tenderness and moments of terrifying vulnerability and a sea of things unsaid. and at the center of it all, of course, two characters who are unsure if they can't bear it or if they simply hunger for more of it. the resulting novel is both gorgeously drawn and absurdly entertaining.
I laughed a lot reading this book. I screamed joyfully a bunch. I also cried so hard at times I didn't realize I was crying until the page got blurry and I couldn't see anything. I cried to see characters, lonely and aching and ashamed enough to hide it, finally release the need to be right, finally give themselves what they need, and finally begin to feel like they’re enough. I cried to see them believe each other's pain and treat each other with joyful tenderness and protect, with ferocious care, the spaces around which they can be vulnerable with one another, and therefore safe, and therefore free.
mostly, I cried to see the betweenness, the permeability, we can allow one another and make it a countervailing force to grief, to bitterness, to loneliness, turn it into something that can bear our weight, and pull us out, that can make a life, once stifling and untenanted, into a place of surprise and enchantment and change, a place of big gatherings and loud conversation and someone else's shoulder against yours in the kitchen at the end of the night, when all is dim and silent and still.
like I said, a good romance novel.
I really loved this book and I recommend it with my whole best heart and I desperately need the universe (Rachel Reid) to produce more of this very specific thing, thank you....more
chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
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adult-contemporary
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