“I took a shower once a week at most. I stooped tweezing, stopped bleaching, stopped waxing, stopped brushing my hair. No moisturizing or exfoliating. No shaving. I left the apartment infrequently.”
The hibernation project which entails sleeping for long hours hinders the narrator from partaking in routine hygienic practices. Consequently, the narrator neglects her body and hygiene. The hibernation brings all the routine activities to a halt. The narrator frequently comments on the social expectations of women's bodies, and one way to view her hibernation is as a sort of dropping out of these expectations.
“I can't point to any one event that resulted in my decision to go into hibernation. Initially, I just wanted some downers to drown out my thoughts and judgements, since the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything. I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me. I started seeing Dr. Tuttle in January 2000. It started off innocently: I was plagued with misery, anxiety, a wish to escape the prison of my mind and body.”
The narrator describes misanthropy as the main reason she wants to sleep for a year. As the narrative progresses, we learn that this hatred of the people around her serves to mask the narrator's deep grief over the death of her parents, and her lack of a meaningful relationship with them.
“I can’t blame Dr. Tuttle for her terrible advice. I elected to be her patient, after all. She gave me everything I asked for and I appreciated her for that. I’m sure there were others like her out there, but the same with which I’d found her, and the immediate relief that her prescriptions provided, made me feel that I’d discovered a pharmaceutical shaman, a magus, a sorcerer, a sage.”
The narrator lives in a world full of professional misconduct. Her psychiatrist is a quack, her boss sleeps with the artists she represents, and her best friend sleeps with her own boss. For the narrator, it's more of a matter of exploiting this inevitable misconduct to her own ends than finding someone who operates with integrity.
“Not that what I was doing was suicide. In fact, it was the opposite of suicide. My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to save my life.”
This quote highlights the difference between how the narrator views her hibernation, and how those around her view it. One of the central themes of the book is that healing can appear to be self-destruction, and that self-destruction can disguise itself as self-care. Simultaneously, this quote refers to the suicide of the narrator's mother, declaring that the narrator chooses a different path.
“On the weekends, I did what young women in New York like me were supposed to do, at first: I got colonics and facials and highlights, worked out at an overpriced gym, lay in the hammam there until I went blind, and went out at night in shoes that cut my feet and gave me sciatica. I met interesting men at the gallery from time to time. I slept around in spurts, going out more, then less. Nothing ever panned out in terms of “love.” Reva often spoke about “settling down.” That sounded like death to me.
“I’d rather be alone than anybody’s live-in prostitute,” I said to Reva.”
This quote reveals that part of what the narrator aims to escape is the pressures on young women in her social class in New York City. The life expected of young women - go out until you meet a man, and then settle down with him - feels like a total dead end to her. This underscores one of her reasons for, essentially, going on a strike and hibernating for a year.
