The unnamed narrator of Moshfegh’s compelling and unsettling novel is a woman who has everything: looks, a brand-new degree from Columbia, a job at an art gallery, an Upper East Side apartment, and a substantial inheritance. But her fairy-tale existence feels cursed. In 2000, she decides to escape her life by taking enough drugs to sleep through it all for a year. Aside from the psychiatrist who writes the prescriptions, she sees only a college friend and a boyfriend. Her plan works for a while, then a new drug, Infermiterol, causes strange and frightening blackouts and the narrator must face what it is she really needs. As she did in Eileen, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction, Moshfegh writes with both humor and an unflinching attention to parts of life we’d rather not see, but can’t look away from.

https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780525522119

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