“My Year of Rest and Relaxation” by Ottessa Moshfegh (post 3): New York Times Book Review has truthful illustration; Wall Street Journal review is pithy

As previously mentioned, there is a discrepancy between the book and its cover. The protagonist is blonde, but the woman on the cover is brunette.

The review in The New York Times, truthful to the novel, is illustrated with a blonde (but the review does not explain the cover): https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/books/review/ottessa-moshfegh-my-year-of-rest-and-relaxation.html

Moshfegh’s novel is the third of three reviews by Sam Sacks in today’s Wall Street Journal. The review is brief, but unknowingly highlights two key issues of multiple personality: https://www.wsj.com/articles/fiction-young-and-privileged-and-perpetually-at-sea-1530838596

The review’s first paragraph mentions the protagonist’s blackouts. Sacks accepts the novel’s presumption that they’re entirely attributable to drugs, whereas I suspect that though facilitated by drugs, they are dissociative fugues of multiple personality.

The second paragraph quotes the novel as saying that the point of all the protagonist’s sleep is to “disappear completely, then reappear in some new form,” which I interpret as seeking to switch from one personality to another.