Ottessa Moshfegh

#RichKids of Beverly Hills if one of them tried to seclude themselves from society in an effort to metamorphosize.

Chapter two and onwards are fun; I enjoyed the later third of the book the most as it amped up in a way I did not expect. The book focuses briefly on art as something to be consumed, and the short storyline around it was enjoyable. Pretty crude.

The book is meant to be absurd, so don't think too hard about the logical workings of various things. It's both enjoyable and draining, like potato chips. I would not recommend to those that want to avoid difficult casts, drug abuse, and stories centered around wealth (the story is more propagated from wealth, but the idea still stands).… (more)

2

Weird depressed girl lives with her alcoholic mentally impaired former cop father and works at a boys juvenile jail. (The prison metaphor is strong / she works in one and lives in one.)
But she’s edgy guys - she keeps a dead mouse in her glovebox, wears her dead mums clothes and obsesses over her co-workers and the 14 year old boy inmates who look 19.
She has dirty hands, abuses laxatives and barely eats - so eccentric people. her character felt contrived.
It was incredibly slow and dull right up until the end where she does a Personality 180 and everything happens.

If I had known this was a thriller that features child rape I wouldn’t have read it. Not for me.… (more)

The narrator, a young woman from a wealthy family, living in New York's Upper East Side, becomes dissatisfied with her post-college life after the death of her father from cancer, then her mother from suicide (triggered by an interaction with medications and alcohol), and embarks on a 'project' to sleep as much as possible over the next year. She contacts probably the worst psychiatrist in history, who actually starts writing prescriptions for sleep aids as soon as the narrator walks in the door. The narrator uses this psychiatrist to get a veritable pharmacy of drugs to help her sleep, and she doesn't even confess to her that she's already sleeping 14 or 15 hours a night, plus an hour at lunch. The book is her story, as the project continues, and how it reaches an end where she becomes involved in a strange art project around her sleeping. By turns very funny and also disturbing, it's a picture of New York city in the year before 9/11, but at the same time feels a bit prophetic about these COVID days.… (more)