This was such a strange little book! I think I liked it? But maybe I didn’t fully understand it – or at least what it was trying to do?
Our unnamed narrator seemingly has it all – she’s pretty, thin, Columbia grad, and wealthy enough that she doesn’t really need her job at a hot art gallery. Which last is probably for the best, because sleep is taking over her life. She can’t seem to shake the idea that if she could only sleep – hibernate, really – for a year, everything would be different. She would wake up rested, refreshed, a new person with a new outlook and new purpose. In pursuit of this quest, she finds Dr. Tuttle, the quackiest shrink in all of New York, who hands out prescription tranquilizers like Skittles. The biggest obstacle to her plans is Reva, her best friend from college who just won’t go away. When our narrator starts taking a new prescription, she discovers she has blacked out for three full days, but her body has been up to some shenanigans.
Over the course of the book, we get flashbacks to the past, and start to learn more about why our narrator might just want to disappear. Her father has died of cancer, and her mother died by suicide, after killing herself slowly for years with drink. Our narrator has no sense of belonging in the world, but she despises Reva for wanting so desperately to fit in.
I feel about this book a bit the way I felt about Sally Rooney’s Normal People. I can recognize the skill and craft the author wielded in creating this book. I found myself caring for the main character; I can see her pain, and I’m rooting for her to get better. I’m just not sure I liked anybody in this book, and I’m pretty sure I have no idea what point the author is trying to make. Yet if you go on Goodreads, people are raving about both the book and the author. I just didn’t get the hype.