Ottessa Moshfegh and the “Mean-Lennial Anti-Hero” in My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Abstract

This paper considers the flourishing of the mode of millennial fiction, film and television within the last decade and the concomitant growth of the figure of the messy millennial woman. It does so primarily through the lens of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) and her unnamed “mean-lennial anti-hero” protagonist. Moshfegh’s myopic, mean and unmoored perennial “girl” serves as a litmus for understanding the complex identity politics of the postfeminist, late capitalist and neoliberal world which millennials occupy. The protagonist’s distinctly anti-heroic yet deeply self-editorialised quest to do nothing also reflects the self-conscious process of self-definition that is embarked upon by young women in a paradoxically liberating and limiting age, and represents a growing form of literary expression unique to millennial-aged female artists in the twenty-first century. While Moshfegh’s protagonist’s experiences are deliberately confined by an, arguably, dislikeable mixture of narcissism and privilege, I propose that they work to establish broader contours of young millennial womanhood, both in fiction and in real life.