New York Times book review of “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” by Ottessa Moshfegh describes dissociative fugues, symptom of multiple personality

“My Year of Rest and Relaxation” is about what happens when Moshfegh’s 24-year-old narrator becomes intentionally addicted to antidepressants and other meds and, more centrally, to the sleep that results…she does not want to be awake much. She begins to wonder…Why climb out of bed at all?…

“The narrator begins to sleep most of the day and sometimes to go on walkabouts while blacked out. She wakes to find that she has gone to clubs or had her pubic hair waxed or rearranged her furniture. Once she comes to on the Long Island Rail Road, a waking nightmare for sure” (1).

The review seems to assume that the medication caused blackouts in which the protagonist traveled to various places, engaged in varied and complex out-of-character behavior, and then had amnesia for it; that is, dissociative fugues. (Search “dissociative fugue” for past posts on that recurring subject.)

It is more likely that the medication put her host personality to sleep, allowing her alternate personalities to take over and do their own things.

Is the reviewer just refraining from revealing too much? Or is this yet one more novel with unintentional, unacknowledged, multiple personality?

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/02/books/review-ottessa-moshfegh-my-year-of-rest-relaxation.html