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Her name was Magda.

Death in her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

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I find Ottessa Moshfegh to be incredibly divisive as a writer. Of all her work, I was a little lukewarm on Eileen, but I might reread it soon, and I LOVED her story collection. I actively disliked McGlue, and thought My Year of Rest and Relaxation was amazing. I also really really liked this one. If you didn’t, I get it; she is divisive. So we begin with our narrator Vesta walking her dog in the woods where she lives. She finds a note that cryptically suggests a […]

I’m Just Not That Into Her

Death In Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

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This is try number three with Ottessa Moshfegh’s work and I have to finally admit that she’s not an author suited to my tastes, even as I admire her immense talent for writing. She is great at making the banal interesting and describing the internal monologue of the isolated and potentially manic. Her prose is beautiful. I totally get why people like her. But her characters and stories are so relentlessly uninteresting. I would have never imagined a person with this kind of talent could […]

It was my first day.

Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid

So Much Longing in So Little Space by Karl Ove Knausgard

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliffe

McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh

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Lucy – 4/5 Stars I’ve read a handful of Jamaica Kincaid books, and her nonfiction book A Small Place stands out as a kind of collective memoir, nonfiction history from the perspective of someone who grew up in Antigua. This book acts similarly (as well as a similarly to her short stories in At the Bottom of the River) as a way of fleshing out the sparse lived experiences embedded in the more transitory pieces. What this novel most feels like to me is a first person […]

It’s about sleeping, and it’s somehow exhausting

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

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I mean, I get that the unlikable narrator/main character was the point but oh god did I just want to sleep through this book myself and get it over with. This has one of the most fascinating book covers I have seen recently and yet it’s paired with one of the most deeply dull stories. Pass. I read ASKReviews’s review of this one a few weeks ago, so at least I was prepared for the disappointment. Basically, a disaffected, blonde, thin, pretty, rich girl (she […]

A chrysalis of drugs

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

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I’ve literally just finished this novel, and am writing this before the prose has had time to dry in my mind. I feel that this is what the unnamed ‘protagonist’ of My Year of Rest and Relaxation would want. The only thing that would please her more would be if I had dry-swallowed my last musty Seroquel (collecting dust since 2008) from my jewelry box before turning on my laptop. My Year of Rest and Relaxation reads like one long, babbling sentence. It had very […]



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