The Woman Destroyed, My Year of Rest & Relaxation, and Three Women: Three Books and Their Impact on my Evolving Sense-of-Self.
Perhaps the best place to start is from the beginning. Since I was a kid, books have always been important to me. As a child, they were windows into worlds beyond imagination. As a teenager, they were a gateway to step out of reality and into these worlds for a brief moment. But as I’ve evolved into a young adult, my relationship with literature has evolved with me. While I once used stories to escape from myself and reality, I now use them to introspect to look deeper into myself and my life. Here is what I have learned from three of the most impactful books I’ve read – Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed, Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women – and what they have taught me about both myself and the world around me.
The Woman Destroyed
What struck me most about de Beauvoir’s three long stories of women facing later-in-life crises was her style of writing. To claim syntax triumphs over stories of infidelity, mental illness and being driven to the brink of insanity is a lofty claim, but one de Beauvoir’s use of language deserves. Through each story, de Beauvoir presents the concepts of melancholy, despair, and rage on a silver platter, and proceeds to shove it down the reader’s throat. Gut-wrenching and eerily familiar, The Woman Destroyed sheds light on the emotions we refuse to name, confronts the anti-heroes of the human experience, and holistically paints a picture of what it means to be a woman at the discretion of others.
My Year of Rest & Relaxation
Beauty, wealth, New York City: what could be so terribly wrong? Ottessa Moshfegh’s second novel sets out to answer this question as it follows a 24-year-old girl who spends the year trying to sleep away her life. As a reader, you become more acquainted with the protagonists’ illness rather than the protagonist herself, leading to a fascinating perspective of the world not through her eyes, but through her hated of the world. Once again, writing style puts a shiney bow on the otherwise uncomfortable topics My Year of Rest & Relaxation shamelessly confronts. Moshfegh uses what should be a lethal combination of an untrustworthy, unlikable main character and an extreme depiction of depression to somehow rope the reader in again and again to ask themselves the same question: what could be so terribly wrong?.
Three Women
Three Women is by far the most raw and slightly disturbing of these three books. Likely because of this, it’s the one that has affected me most. Three Women follows the story of (you guessed it) three women with vastly different lives over the course of eight years. This book is uncomfortably intimate, layered with emotion and full of risks. It is the truest depiction of love, loss, betrayal, grief, and rage as it applies to every corner of one’s life. Taddeo’s ability to draw parallels between three women’s experiences that live separate existences is unparalleled (pun intended) and leaves the reader with unexpected hope in the wake of heartbreak.
What I’ve Learned
These three books all have something in common – perhaps because though the human experience is an isolating one, it is also a universal one. From what I now understand, it surpasses time, culture and language and boils like water at the surface of every person’s being. Each of these books takes basic human fears – infidelity, substance abuse, growing old – and pushes them to the absolute extreme. Another commonality in these stories; for all, life went on.
These books gave me more than entertainment or an interesting read. The Woman Destroyed, My Year of Rest & Relaxation, and Three Women gave me a name for and a reason to believe in the emotions we so often shy away from: human.