My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

A shocking, hilarious and strangely tender novel about a young woman’s experiment in narcotic hibernation, aided and abetted by one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature. Our narrator has many of the advantages of life, on the surface. Young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents in college, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

This story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs, designed to heal us from our alienation from this world, shows us how reasonable, even necessary, that alienation sometimes is. Blackly funny, both merciless and compassionate – dangling its legs over the ledge of 9/11 – this novel is a showcase for the gifts of one of America’s major young writers working at the height of her powers.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, Mental Health, Book Club, Adult

289 pages, Paperback

First published July 10, 2018

About the author

Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Death in Her Hands, her second and third novels, were New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World and a novella, McGlue. She lives in Southern California.

Reviews

[Ash · Rating 1 out of 5]

TL;DR: I fucking hated this book. My Year of Rest and Relaxation could have been good. I was expecting something like You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine: a weird, disturbing book about a young woman dissociating from modern society. Instead I got 300 pages of vapid bullshit that seems unreasonably proud of itself. If you're here looking for recommendations, I'd give this one a pass and read the Kleeman instead.

Another entry in the baffling 'women can be assholes too!' movement, My Year of Rest and Relaxation is all smoke and mirrors: Moshfegh is a good enough writer on a sentence level to make it seem like her book is about something, but I can assure you that it is absolutely not. There's so little substance in the actual text that I'm not even sure how to go about this review. I've been reading good reviews all morning to try and figure out what I missed, but a lot of people who wrote positive reviews didn't actually like it either: it's an unpleasant reading experience, and a lot of the book's high ratings seem to be on the dubious merit of that unpleasantness. I wonder if the sunk cost fallacy isn't at work here: if someone published this and someone edited it and someone nominated the author's previous work for awards, then this must be good, right? We wouldn't all have put so much effort into a boring hack. I don't think that writing about nasty people doing nasty things takes any particular skill, though, or that it has intrinsic value - the only skill seems to be in a marketing strategy which has convinced us that if we don't like a book that means it's good, actually.

I'm not sure how to go about this other than by listing this book's apparent strengths, according to its fans:

The characters are so unlikeable!

It's probably clear at this point that I don't think writing unlikeable characters for the sake of being able to is very compelling; it seems conceited on the part of the author, and a bit like I'm being invited in on a mean spirited joke. It's strange to me that this is a draw for other readers. I'm glad that Moshfegh has come to the conclusion that rich, pretty people can be unlikeable; I don't have any particular desire to discuss that with her at length.

Moshfegh has a response for complaints like mine, from an interview she did with the Guardian for her novel Eileen: "When I ask Moshfegh about the reception of the novel, she rails against those who 'want to know in this juicy way why I have written such an unlikable character. I just want to say: ‘How dare you?’' We live in a world in which mass murderers are re-elected, she says, yet it’s an unlikable female character that is found to be offensive: it’s 'sexist and idiotic'."

I think that calling this out as sexist - which is the typical answer, and not a Moshfegh original by any means - is a smokescreen. We're not talking about an actual woman who exists in the world: we're talking about a character that someone intentionally made up. Characters don't end up this horrible by accident, and it's worth questioning why someone sat down and labored over a character so unrealistically nasty. I really don't think there's a good reason, which is why the question is always met with immediate deflection. It seems like a sneaky way for female authors to show how much better and smarter they are than other women while pretending that they're practicing some radical act of feminism.

But it's so weird and dark and disturbing!

The narrator was so removed from her own experiences that this didn't read as very dark or disturbing to me, but even if it had, I don't think that's an especially compelling reason to read something. (Incidentally, this is also why I've drifted away from Chuck Palahniuk.) Most of my favorite books this year were disturbing but they were also about something, and that's why I liked them; a book that's trying to be disturbing at the expense of having a plot or even one character that you can empathize with is like a bad jump scare. It works, but it's easy and shallow and forgettable. It takes no particular skill and has no meaning. I've considered that this actually is the point - that books don't have to mean anything, that they can just exist as objects untethered from any deeper philosophical inquiry - but it turns out that is a point after all, it's just a stupid one.

This book is a detailed example of what it is like to be depressed.

You know what? Sure, I'll give it this one. Depression makes the world boring and it can make depressed people very difficult to like. I'm not sure that taking a deep dive into "depressed people are self centered and horrible" is a helpful or kind thing to do, but it's at least not wholly inaccurate.

I do take offense at our culture's continued fascination with the idea that people can be both rich and depressed. I realize, as all depressed people do, that depression isn't contingent on our material circumstances: I fucking know that rich people can be depressed. I also know that having money lifts a huge burden off of their shoulders. You can't buy happiness but you can certainly buy therapy, medication, and the time to properly take care of yourself - things which are categorically denied to people who aren't very wealthy or very privileged. I am not the only one who drags my depressed ass to work every day for the privilege of not being able to afford the medication that might make it easier to stay alive, and I do not give a single shit about how depressed rich people may or may not be. Let's all agree to stop telling this story in 2019.

But the writing is so charming and funny!

Is it?

The ending is great: it shows that the narrator has grown & changed. Such a punch in the gut! & very uplifting.

There is a trite, stupid little chapter after our narrator has come out of her Infermiterol daze where she starts going outside and feeding squirrels corn flakes in the park. I suppose this is meant to show that she has changed; now, she is capable of seeing beauty and engaging with a world outside of herself. It felt shallow and unearned, but perhaps it was meant to feel shallow and unearned, because then the final chapter of this book is a half-page summary of the narrator discovering that her friend Reva died in the World Trade Center on September 11th. She has recorded a video from the news in which a woman leaps to her death from the burning building. The narrator decides to believe that the woman is Reva, and watches the footage over and over, apparently for years. The book's last line, on which people seem to be fairly divided, is this: There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.

This is an incredibly offensive thing to say, made worse because it's also fucking meaningless. I have the sense that Moshfegh thinks she can get away with this by putting it in the mouth of a horrendous character and giving it a clever little twist: our narrator has spent the past year asleep because she can't face the mundanity of her day to day life, but a woman who has leapt to her death from a burning building is really awake. Do you get it, though? Do you see what she did there? It's a juxtaposition between sleeping and wakefulness and life and death. It's like, you can totally sleepwalk through life and someone dying can be truly awake, you know what I mean?

This is exactly the kind of ~*~deep~*~ shit my friends and I used to come up with when we were 19 and stoned; it's a literary version of that 'real eyes realize real lies' nonsense that we used to post on Myspace. It's dumb word play that's purporting to actually mean something and the fact that it's the last line of this fucking stupid book is infuriating to me. Is it supposed to be funny? Ironic? Am I supposed to think that the narrator is a better person, or just the same shithead that she always was but a year older? Is it a treatise on the meaning of the book? Is it just Ottessa Moshfegh having a laugh that the literary establishment has welcomed her trite, boring nonsense with open arms, or am I supposed to be taking this seriously?

This book defies categorization not because it's tricky, clever, or meaningful, but because it's emotionally and thematically empty. It's not about anything and it has nothing to say. It's a series of images strung together to absolutely no end and its strongest selling point is that with its last line it finally engendered a single emotion in me: incredulous rage.

In the same Guardian interview I mentioned above, Moshfegh said that "[her] writing lets people scrape up against their own depravity, but at the same time it’s very refined … It’s like seeing Kate Moss take a shit." This is a fucking hilariously conceited thing for someone to say, but it also introduces the only worthwhile question I can muster about Moshfegh's work: who is this for? What audience is being allowed to (lol) "scrape up against their own depravity"? I can't say, other than that I'm clearly not a part of it.

When you don't like books like this, people are quick to pin the blame on you: you just don't get it. Things don't have to be likeable to be important. Sometimes, though, there's nothing there to get, and being unlikeable doesn't give something intrinsic value. I hate the idea that important literature can't also be fun, and I hate this senseless hackjob of a book.

[chai ♡ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think the best books force themselves into our minds and make a quiet disturbance there. They strike something in us, and even if we don’t fully understand it, we feel altered in some strange and irrevocable way.

It is hard to know what to make of My Year of Rest and Relaxation and its narrator. I inhaled the story in two quick sittings and found myself afterwards in something of a daze. My mind was spinning, a compass without a lodestone, and no matter how much I held up my feelings to the light, I could not decide if I were feeling bereft that it was over, or simply relieved.

The narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a rich, orphaned, conventionally beautiful WASP in her twenties who hopes to annihilate her past and emerge an improved version of herself by devoting an entire year to nothing but sleep. To ensure this transformation, she dopes herself up on prescription and over-the-counter drugs. In her waking hours, she makes regular visits to the street corner bodega, to the drug store, and less regular ones to Dr. Tuttle for the purpose of restocking her supply of pharmaceuticals. She watches popular movies from the 90s (ideally starring Harrison Ford or Whoopi Goldberg), and endures visits from her “best friend” Reva who drinks, worries about being skinny, makes herself vomit, and recites hollow-eyed feel-good self-help slogans.

This is the baffling premise on which My Year of Rest and Relaxation depends, and Moshfegh makes little effort to rationalize it. Instead, the novel records this process of self-creation—what the narrator describes as her “hibernation”—which (at its most destructive) amounts to a total disavowal of the past, a kind of self-obliteration. Our narrator wants to slough off her past self like old dead skin, and re-emerge into the world more sharply herself. As a possibility, this effort is frightening, but—a little exhilarating too. The longing is that our narrator might pack herself into sleep so deeply and for so long that she can never unpack her (old) self again. After a year of “feel[ing] nothing…a blank slate” with “no past or present,” she might raise her head, look into the mirror, and find, reflected back, a completely altered self.

At its heart, this is a novel that reaches to the parts of ourselves that know what it means to live in a world that one does not want, and which one did not choose for themselves, and wanting out. My Year of Rest and Relaxation offers an anti-social way out of such a bind. Our narrator, who “hate[s] talking to people,” is desperate to express this essential loss to the world, a reprieve that neither friends nor lovers can provide. With no past to lean on or learn from, no future can be imagined, and with a present that is entirely occupied with “black emptiness, an infinite space of nothingness,” our narrator’s acts of self-destruction grow and luxuriate unbearably. She does not attempt to reform or repair the broken pieces of her life, or exercise control over them, nor can she stop the past from reemerging. Scenes from her childhood interrupt her hibernation: a cold, unloving family, and later, a sleazy ex-lover and a ruptured intimacy with a friend she keeps hurting needlessly.

A quote from Toni Morrison’s novel, Sula, rose up from some shadowy recess of my mind when I was reading this book: “And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.” The novel’s narrator is an artist without an art form. Her relationship to art, in fact, is one of greatest disillusionment. In one memorable paragraph, our narrator makes an exact and frankly depressing observation about the state of art:

The art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fueled by greed and gossip and cocaine. I might as well have worked on Wall Street. Speculation and opinions drove not only the market but the products, sadly, the values of which were hinged not to the ineffable quality of art as a sacred human ritual—a value impossible to measure, anyway—but to what a bunch of rich assholes thought would “elevate” their portfolios and inspire jealousy and, delusional as they all were, respect. I was perfectly happy to wipe out all that garbage from my mind.

With no art form, no viable outlet for expressing her brokenness, our narrator—in her quest to escape her grief, to be cured of herself and be reborn—simply self-destructs.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation descends into dark places: Moshfegh explores the emotional wreckage of her narrator with a precision both touching and terrifying. There is a liberatory sort of shock to reading about a version of woman that is messy, porous, detestable, cruel, passive, and self-loathing; to transform the novel into a space where that woman is able to bleed and break apart, where she has permission to lose herself and not be wrong. It is that messy rawness of life that makes this novel not just provocative but persuasive as well, a novel that compels the reader into a riskier intimacy, caught up in the strange gravity of a narrator whose acts are both recklessly vulnerable and utterly unforgivable. It also, frankly, puts an unrepentantly horrible narrator in better charity with the reader.

Moshfegh also plays fast and loose with the novel’s traditional plot structure. In a novel of impasse and precarity, such infidelity to plot is required: it gives depth and form to the utter formlessness and trespass of grief. My Year of Rest and Relaxation emphasizes rupture and repetition rather than continuity. There is a sense of unreality to the passage of time in the story: time either moves in stuttering, lumpy pieces, like swimming through syrup, or strangely fast, with a lucidity more terrifying than the narrator’s drug-induced listlessness. It is as though the novel makes the point that time works differently when you’re grieving—or when you’re losing your mind.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation also, crucially, refuses our appetite for resolution. Although the novel ends with a sense of lightness and the spectral possibility of healing, it does not go from “black emptiness” to an ecstatic, devotional appreciation of living. In Central Park, as our narrator watches “life buzz[ing] between each shade of green, from dark pines and supple ferns to lime green moss growing on a huge, dry gray rock,” she tells us that “My sleep had worked. I was soft and calm and felt things. This was good. This was my life now.” Maybe her sleep did work. Or maybe it was the relief of knowing that, whether we are happy or not, the world simply goes on, in a way that predates all of us, and which will certainly outlive us.

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, this one went down nice n' easy, like I imagine an Ambien would.

ADMISSION: I'm a little bit in love with this author, this woman who is often maligned for being gross and writing about nasty female characters, for being deliberately provocative relying solely on shock value, and oh don't forget, she's just plain unlikable. All of which makes me say: "SO WHAT?"

Ottessa Moshfegh does write about icky things people do, magnifies the cruel dark bits of life we would rather gloss over. If you need your literature to be overall pleasant and safe, clear of eye gunk and shit and pubic hair, I would give her a wide berth. And that's 100% okay - not every book is for every reader.

But if you're willing to read something dark and dangerous, to laugh at wicked, sardonic humour, to listen to a pitiless, confrontational story, then you are in luck. Plus, that cover. Isn't it fierce?

I felt at home when reading the words in this book. Life is hard! And sometimes many of us wish we could lay our head on the pillow and not wake up for a week or so, thereby avoiding the everyday struggle and banality. Our narrator is tired of her life. She wants to 'hibernate' for one year, and wake up a new person. Not literally a new person - technically she will be the same, but her hope is that she will awake with a brand new outlook. See, her parents died within a few months of each other, and losing them heightened the even more painful, everyday, life-long losses she endured in her family. So even though she's independently wealthy, beautiful and living in Manhattan in the year 2000, she'd rather close her eyes and pass the time in unconsciousness.

She's got an envious, try-hard friend in Reva. She's got Dr. Tuttle, a horrid psychiatrist who enables her pill-popping to the extreme. (Both of these characters are morbidly hilarious.) And she has Trevor, an on-again-off-again relationship that is more abusive than anything else.

Other than that, she's got her drugs, and a VCR with a bunch of Whoopi Goldberg movies.

The pages slide by, in a drugged haze. There's some repetition here: lots of taking pills, watching 80s movies, feeling confused about what might have happened during a blackout, or feeling frustrated at the lack of efficacy of the current chemical cocktail. Never though, did my interest wane. This is a character study expertly rendered. I was watching a person on the very edge of the world, sitting right on the edge, exceptionally alone in her ennui, light as air in her earthly impact. She might just float away, and no one would notice. I understood that existential feeling. And I wanted to know if she would be 'alright'.

Her drugged year ends just before 9/11, which is the most jarring wake-up call Moshfegh could summon.

I recognised a few similarities to Eileen - both protagonists are 24 year old females, drowning in insufferable inner worlds. Both are stories of escape, are ice picks to the heart, are dark as can be. Both feature addiction and characters with image issues and eating disorders. This one, though, is funnier, and, c'mon, even features a paragraph on Mickey Rourke in 9 1/2 Weeks.

This book asks the question of whether we can ever really escape pain. And is anyone ever 'alright'? Probably not, because there's so little we can control. But, confronting life with whatever it brings is the way to live in this world, even if it's jumping off a building. That's where freedom is: being wide, wide awake.

[emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

not to sound like i believe myself to the center of the universe, but...i am and i do and this book was probably written for me.

https://emmareadstoomuch.substack.com...

i, like our protagonist, am a 24-year-old blonde with exactly one toxic but adoring friend who daydreams about the idea of sleeping away a week / month / year and waking up refreshed and renewed and in a slightly different, shinier life.

in college, the aforementioned singular friend and i lived through finals and midterms and forty-hour workweeks combined with internships and full-time course-loads by fantasizing about comas. just a few weeks or so, no brain damage, modern-day snow whites escaping capitalism or the patriarchy or what have you.

all of this is to say that the only thing that separates me from this protagonist is the first two decades of the millennium and the wherewithal to get it done.

life is painful and exhausting and gross. life is stained crate & barrel couches and intolerable people with trust funds who can't tolerate themselves and caffeine addictions upheld by sh*tty coffee. life needs pills to get you through it and pills to get you out of it.

but life is also the in-betweens: waking up from blackouts (proverbial or literal) to full-body enjoy a slice of pizza standing in front of your fridge. feeling the sun on your skin at the end of winter. sitting in a park and watching people be happy. calling friends.

and life is knowing that the worst part of it all could be just around the corner, on the very last page. but the best part could come a few after.

and maybe the bad parts are actually the in-betweens of the happy ones.

that isn't what this book is about, but it's a fun side effect.

bottom line: this book is good.

reread update: want to note that a) i don't think that you're supposed to like this protagonist, god help me, and b) raising this to a 5, because this is not a perfect book (that ending...shudder) but it's close to it for me!

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2nd reread

depressive episode reading

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reread pre-review

i have almost no new insight.

still review & rating to come

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reread update

doing the Bravest thing i can imagine: rereading this less than 3 weeks after i read it for the first time just so i can buddy read with lily (and also hopefully figure out a rating)

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pre-review

how could i possibly be expected to sum up this book with a number between 1 and 5?

review & rating to come

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tbr review

secretly i hope every book i pick up will turn out to be the kind of depressing, nasty, female-authored literary fiction populated by unlikable young women and Something to Say about the soullessness of late-stage capitalism that changes my internal monologue for 10-14 days and sears disturbing images into my brain.

i have a good feeling about this one.

[Cindy Pham · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very accurate depiction of depression—you feel the main character’s monotony, the lethargy, the pointlessness of it all. As someone who copes with depression by sleeping an excessive amount, I understood where she was coming from, and picked up this book out of curiosity to see what happens when someone submits to that nihilistic desire to not associate with the world anymore. The relationship between the main character and her best friend provided an interesting look at both sides of unhappiness: one that is cynical and apathetic and succumbs to inactivity, and one that is shallow positivity to desperately cope with life. I thought this was a unique way of showing different types of depression and how they are alike and different at the same time.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of missed opportunities for the story to be more insightful and memorable beyond the exaggerated experiment of taking a mental health day. Many reviews complain that the main character is deplorable and annoyingly privileged, but I argue that was on purpose. The fault is more so that there wasn’t much done with this purposeful portrayal. I think showing more vulnerability to her character would have added more insight and humanity, especially since she was clearly grieving over her parents and projecting her self-hatred onto her best friend, but there was little payoff for these subplots. (I suppose the lack of payoff is realistic, but I wonder if that justifies a good 300-page novel.) The middle part drags, which makes the tonal shift and tacked-on conclusion towards the end, in contrast, feel too abrupt and heavy-handed.

[AsToldByKenya · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is horrible. I am not one of those people who says "I just don't get it." I understand exactly what this book is trying to do. This books has no deep message nor is it a stroke of genius from its writer. It is a book about grief and depression, and how it brings out the worst in us, and how we want to escape from the world around us, but life is worth living and blah blah blah. Not only do I not like this book I also don't respect it. I don't respect its writing, its message , its plot or it's ending. This is not a good book. It is sudo intelligent. It makes a mockery fo its own subject matter and is insufferable to read. I know our narrator being insufferable is the point and if that works for you great. But in order for that to work for me I need a purpose and this books only purpose for that is grief and depression, so it feels hollow, flat, thin.

[persephone ☾ · Rating 4 out of 5]

this bitch really said let me sleep for one year because wtf is my life and i ate that shit up 😩

i love books with unlikeable characters, and this book served to say the least :) There is absolutely no one to root for, like no one and still this book managed to keep me hooked until the last page.

[chan ☆ · Rating 1 out of 5]

it's rare to enjoy both the writing and the concept for a book and then totally hate the execution.

but i don't think that a self obsessed and sort of traumatized WASP giving catty commentary juxtaposed with the idea of sleeping for a year really worked. i certainly wanted it to, but this left me very empty. i think i'm too dumb to really "get" this kind of intellectualism.

[Tatiana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Listening to this book was like watching Girls.

Occasionally funny and occasionally insightful in a limited, WASP-y kind of way, but mostly ridiculous, privileged, and, ultimately, pointless.

[Kayla Dawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this felt like a chore.

[sophie · Rating 5 out of 5]

how the fuck was it so boring and so good at the same time????

[cass · Rating 4 out of 5]

validated my existence as a lazy whore

[chloe · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is the catcher in the rye for hot women!!!!!!!!!!

[adora · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.”

I too would like to sleep for a year.

[CM · Rating 1 out of 5]

*i received an ARC of this novel through a Goodreads giveaway. which i suppose means final text is still subject to change but i wouldn't get my hopes up.

what a dreadful waste of words. i guess i'm glad the middle of the novel so sedated me in its banality that the utterly cheap 9/11 conclusion was merely offensive rather than absolutely enraging.

moshfegh is clearly a talented writer, and her entertaining wit sneaks through in moments throughout the novel. one only hopes that she will one day free her talents from the shackles of stereotypical MFA melodrama.

[Felice Laverne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was finally doing something that really mattered. Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.

Whew! I had a surprising reaction to this novel. Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation managed to catch me off guard and by surprise. Probably because – funny story – ironically, this book is about a character who does what I always say I’d like to do: have the ability to put my life on pause for just a few days to rest, to think, to recharge. Then press a magic button and the world resumes spinning, without me having lost a single second of my life. Wouldn’t that be wonderful! Well, here’s that idea with a twist: Little Miss Nameless Protagonist here does this for an entire year (while strung out on a myriad of different high-level drugs, all while juggling her semi-unwanted friendship with her best friend and her feelings about the death of her parents and the reality of her shitty boyfriend – really, he’s not even that). Set in the year 2000, our narrator decides to hibernate through a year of her life in an attempt to be a new person on the other side of that time. So, with the help of a zany and negligible psychiatrist who’s first and only line of doctoring is to pull out her prescription pad, our narrator dives deeper and deeper into the world of prescription drugs—and the psychological effects of them—in her quest to sleep away a year of her life.

My Ambien, my Rozerem, my Ativan, my Xanax, my trazodone, my lithium. Seroquel, Lunesta. Valium. I laughed. I teared up. Finally, my heart slowed. My hands started trembling a little, or maybe they’d been trembling all along. “Thank God,” I said aloud…I counted out three lithium, two Ativan, five Ambien. That sounded like a nice mélange, a luxurious free fall into velvet blackness. And a couple of trazodone because trazodone weighed down the Ambien, so if I dreamt, I’d dream low to the ground. That would be stabilizing, I thought. And maybe one more Ativan. Ativan to me felt like fresh air. A cool breeze, slightly effervescent. This was good, I thought. A serious rest. My mouth watered. Good strong American sleep.

Jacques Louis David’s neoclassical painting has been used as the cover, a reference to our protagonist’s “culture,” of which she is so proud and self-important, and her Art History background in college and before she quit the workforce. It’s a nice touch, offering layers of other meanings to this book. Within these pages you’ll find a slew of wholly unlikeable characters – well, unlikeable by the arbitrary standards we tend to think of as what makes a “nice” or “good” person. You won’t find those people here. Instead you’ll find the nameless narrator who knows she’s gorgeous and privileged and secretly loves the fact that her (bulimic, needy, whiny, having an intra-office affair with a married guy) best friend, Reva, is jealous of her. You’ll find the WASP mother of the nameless protagonist who can’t be bothered to mother but instead calls in the nanny and drinks herself to death in the end. The artiste who made his claim to fame by ejaculating on a blank canvas in various colors. And we shan’t forget the “boyfriend” who uses our protagonist for quick sexual trysts that work out to only his benefit and then shuns her for weeks or months until he’s ready for another one. She has become semi-dependent on him and this cycle of abuse, even as she hopes that it will one day stop and that he’ll choose her. Their relationship is twisted and not at all the storybook love affair you’re used to:

I called Trevor again. This time when he answered, I didn’t let him say a word. “If you’re not over here fucking me in the next forty-five minutes then you can call an ambulance because I’ll be here bleeding to death and I’m not gonna slit my wrists in the tub like a normal person. If you’re not here in forty-five minutes, I’m gonna slit my throat right here on the sofa. And in the meantime, I’m going to call my lawyer and tell him I’m leaving everything in the apartment to you, especially the sofa. So you can lean on Claudia or whoever when it comes time to deal with all that. She might know a good upholsterer.

I hear Moshfegh is a fan of writing about these sorts of characters – characters who need a chaser or two before they’ll go down our throats smoothly. This was my first foray into her works, and I don’t mind that. In fact, that quality is what drew me deeper into this novel once I opened the first page. Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation doesn’t shy away from the murk and unpleasantness – really, downright offensiveness – inside of us all, that we’re all capable of. In fact, her characters here seem to revel in the way their ickiness makes them better than other people while simultaneously wallowing in it until it nearly drowns them. It’s a bold and scary line for an author to walk, and to see the characters on, but that’s what we love about writers who can pull it off. We all need that shiny mirror of our own spiny imperfections staring back at us from time to time, don’t we? My Year of Rest and Relaxation is dark and obnoxious, but I loved it. Because, isn’t life that way sometimes? I love characters with bite, maybe a pinch of cruelty in them –

But did I care? I didn’t think so. If Reva’s body was hanging by the neck behind the bath curtain, I might have just gone home.

--I appreciate the layers of characters who aren’t bow-tied in shiny pink ribbons of perfection, happy and grinning stupidly with their perfect teeth and empty heads. I like a character who is…shall I say, more like a real person, imperfections and all. Honestly, I felt like this book was WASPy done well – and I don’t think I’ve ever said that before. Even as she stood at the edge of reality, possibly even the precipice of her life, I was able to forget that her feeling of ennui with her privilege annoyed me. I wanted to reach out my hand to her, hoping she’d be okay:

I wondered if I might be dead, and I felt no sorrow, only worry over the afterlife, if it was going to be just like this, just as boring. If I’m dead, I thought, let this be the end. The silliness. At some point I got up to guzzle water from the tap in the kitchen. When I stood upright afterward, I started to go blind. The fluorescent lights were on overhead. The edges of my vision turned black. Like a cloud, the darkness came and rested in front of my eyes. I could move my eyes up and down, but the black cloud stayed fixed. Then it grew, widening. I buckled down to the kitchen floor and splayed out on the cold tile. I was going to sleep now, I hoped. I tried to surrender. But I would not sleep. My body refused. My heart shuddered. My breath caught. Maybe now is the moment, I thought: I could drop dead right now. Or now. Now. But my heart kept up its dull bang bang, thudding against my chest…

But this novel’s ending is what sealed the deal for me, culminating with 9/11 shortly after our protagonist wakes from her year of sleep. The towers come down, someone she knows dies, and maybe – just maybe – that last line of the novel shows that our protagonist has finally found her humanity. I highly recommend this book to readers who like their characters straight with no chaser--to readers who don't shy away from some of the darker hues of humanity. If you're uncomfortable with that notion, definitely stay away! I was glued to this novel from start to finish, and that resonating ending easily solidified the strong 4 stars I’m offering up. ****

I received an advance-read copy of this book from the publisher, Penguin, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.


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[Antje ❦ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Her job is sleep.

[Brittni Kristine · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was so boring and absolutely no one was likable. I assumed I’d feel some sort of kindred spirit with a depressed woman who decided to sleep her life away, but there was simply no meaning to anything that happened. She was horrible to her best friend, and that had no meaning. She took a treasure trove of pills every day, and that had no meaning. She slept for 4 months, waking every three days to eat, and that had no meaning. I’m walking away from this having learned nothing about depression or anxiety or suicidal thoughts, in fact I don’t truly believe there’s any messaging in this book. It’s just about a mean woman who slept.

[Sophia Judice · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid 3/5. This put me in a terrible slump and took me 3 weeks to finish (for reference, it normally takes me about a day to finish a book this size). I think that the beginning and end have loads of meaningful anecdotes about life and the female experience. It reminded me a lot of The Bell Jar but without the racism. I do have to say that I love reading about totally unlikable and unhinged women, but this book was not that enjoyable of a read for me; however, I believe that is the point. It is a book about a woman sleeping for a year, so naturally, it's going to be slow. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is deliberately boring, which is an interesting artistic choice, but I still don't feel that it was entirely worth the read. I am excited to see the movie, though.

[buket · Rating 2 out of 5]

if i had to choose between 25 years in jail and reading this book again you can be sure that i’ll be rotting in my cell

[Niall · Rating 1 out of 5]

American psycho but the grisly murders have been replaced with a series of naps

[ashlyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reassured me that being a lazy whore is both a lifestyle and a calling.

[Shawn McComb · Rating 5 out of 5]

ur gonna have to wait for the video becausssseee……

[Reading_ Tamishly · Rating 2 out of 5]

The only good part about this book was the way it hooked me from the very first page until the very end.

Did I enjoy the book? No, but I read it till the end. Pure writing talent I would say to this because….

1. I hated all the characters especially the narcissistic, compulsive liar who poked fun of mental health issues, communal stereotyping, manipulative self destructive main character (the narrator of course!)

2. What’s the point of this book other than we could all relate to the character on some of our ‘I don’t care’ moments of our lives?

3. Just not worth the hype. I just cannot believe I wasted two whole days reading this book. Again, pure genius with the writing even when I hated everything else about the book.

One thing for sure I am glad though is that I didn’t buy the book.

(This sounds like my book. The cover is depressing but that's okay. The heart wants what it wants.) Now this was before I actually read the book.

[Candi · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.”

I love to sleep! There’s nothing much better than a deliciously deep slumber without interruption. It’s also one of the most difficult of leisurely activities to come by. Perhaps that’s why when I lay my head down each night I hope that this will indeed be it – the most perfect sleep of all. I can’t tell you when I last experienced such a thing. If I had to guess, it would have been under anesthesia approximately fourteen years ago, and I suspect that doesn’t really count!

“My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to save my life.”

When I first became aware of this novel, my curiosity was piqued but I didn’t really think it would be all that riveting. A woman attempts to take a year off from her life by ingesting a varied and absurd amount of pills in order to sleep the year away and wake up refreshed and renewed. Okay, but that sounds a bit boring. A woman sleeps for a year? What kind of entertainment could a reader possibly find in these pages? Then 2020 happened. What better time than now to languish in a drug-induced state for an entire year of your life? Yes, please! Exactly what remarkable cocktail of pills could do this for me?!

“I’m not a junkie or something. I’m taking some time off. This is my year of rest and relaxation.”

I was completely bowled over by this one! This novel was not a sedative – it was a stimulant, a wake-up call to get up and live your life! It was immensely entertaining – and smart! It seemed somewhat impertinent on my part to burst into laughter at random moments, but I suspect it was the author’s intent for the reader to do just that. Young, beautiful, financially secure, educated and cultured, Moshfegh’s protagonist seems to have everything going for her. But life in her upscale Manhattan apartment is vapid, pretentious and meaningless; or so she has concluded. Enter Dr. Tuttle, one of the most farcical caricatures you’ll come across in literature. She’s the psychiatrist that will prescribe anything and everything under the sun. Here’s a bit of her “wisdom” I can’t resist sharing:

“A lot of psychic diseases get passed around in confined public spaces. I sense your mind is too porous.”

Dr. Tuttle takes the cake here for one of the zaniest, most memorable characters. Speaking of characters, there aren’t loads of them to get to know, for obvious reasons. If you spend most of your time indoors, sleeping, popping pills, and watching movies on VHS cassettes, you’re not going to bump into a whole lot of people. There is a ‘best friend’ of sorts named Reva, who likes to drop in uninvited. She’ll make you think a lot about your own friendships and what kind of meaning they really have. Is it possible that our closest friends envy us, despise us even? Yikes, I don’t even want to think about that. But you’ll get to know what shallow means when you watch these two interact. Mostly everyone else is in the background. We see them through our unnamed narrator’s memories - her ‘on and off’ boyfriend, her now deceased parents. Through these relationships you’ll get a better idea of what makes this woman want to essentially reinvent herself.

I don’t want to spill the beans on any more of this story. I have to admit that I haven’t read something that had me turning the pages so quickly in quite some time. Ottessa Moshfegh is sharp and her voice is invigorating. Seems odd to say this about a plot revolving around sleeping for a year, but it is! It is dark and funny, and you just might want a good pair of muck boots if you tend to get a bit squeamish. Oh, and that ending – just brilliant, really!

“I counted the seconds passing. Time could go on forever like this, I thought again. Time would. Infinity loomed consistently and all at once, forever, with or without me.”

[Barry Pierce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ottessa Moshfegh seems to be completely incapable of producing works that aren't masterpieces.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Audiobook...read by Julia Whelan

Questions I had were:
“Are there really psychiatrists this bad?”
and who has friends like Reva?
My biggest question of all:
how would this funny ( ok, ‘tragic’-comic), but still laughable to me - fascinating fantasy- possibly end for our ‘girl-in-hibernation’? I was curious as hell.
I enjoyed the journey to the end too - the dialogue- the absurdity!
I’m thankful I never felt anxious or addicted to binge read this one. My breaks - were powerful. I was often still engaged thinking about the characters and their choices.
I’d love to know what inspired Ottessa to write it.

“How would a REAL - FULL-YEAR-TIME-OUT transform - heal- and empower me?
Limited TV: (Whoopi Goldberg and Harrison Ford
were favorites for our narrator) ...
No social media - no crazy psychiatrist or friends like Reva coming over???
A full year to REST??
I could do without the drugs - thank you - but I’d get massages - and spend time in nature....
It’s a great fantasy- a year off to rest and relax.
I’d like to bring Paul with me though. 🙂

Imagine .....NO MONEY CONCERNS - and a full year off the grid. How would you plan your year?

I stretched-out my reading weeks with Ottessa’s book - unlike when I listened to “Eileen”...
I liked ‘this’ book, too, just as much - they’re very different though. I didn’t feel the urgency to rush - in fact I held back - not because I didn’t enjoy it. I enjoyed it in small doses. Owning it allowed me the luxury to listen while taking as long as I wanted to finish it .....‘resting & relaxing’.
Soaking in the warm pool while listening to this audiobook was decadent and definitely relaxing!!!!

A full 5 stars from me....
I’m clear it wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea ... but in a strange way- it comforted me.

[Samantha Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review from Hello Yellow Room.

Someone standing in line with Otessa Moshfegh at a Starbucks must have said aloud “I’m not sure there’s a novel that sufficiently embraces apathy brought about by woeful depression,” and Otessa said, “Hold my latte.” If that’s not a factual depiction of how this novel was conceived, then my new favorite author Ms. Moshfegh herself can come correct me. I wouldn’t mind.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a unique twist on the classic metamorphosis tale. Written to take place in the year 2000-2001, it’s a novel based heavily in our transition from 1990’s affluence and innocence and relative ease, into the early 2000’s height of terrorism and anxiety. Our narrator, nameless, lifeless, thin, beautiful, rich, orphaned, plans on spending a year in hibernation to sleep away her emotions, wrapped up in a cocoon of colorful pharmaceutical helpers. She finds herself a quack psychiatrist, Dr. Tuttle (hilariously rife with terrible advice), to prescribe her every sleep aid on the market. She takes her apathy in extreme doses, a perfect prescription for a privileged white female in the midst of a foggy depression. Our narrator is as completely disinterested with herself as she is in the rest of the world, which impresses me in a way I can’t put my finger on. I’ve rarely come across a character in literary fiction so uninterested in themselves.

Juxtaposed with our narrator is her best friend from college, the sweet and try-hard Reva. Desperate to fit in, bulimic, chasing trends and having affairs with bosses, Reva is the stereotypical antithesis to our apathetic heroine. She issues Oprah-book-club axioms and sophomoric attempts at psychoanalysis, trying to establish a connection with our narrator, to no avail. In the end, her frantic running around attempting to change herself is just as ineffectual as the narrator’s standing still.

The plot, or lack thereof, rides a strange dream-like quality of repetition and haziness. Our narrator begins to black out and do things without her waking knowledge; she throws parties, goes on shopping binges, duct tapes her phone to odd places, harasses her old boyfriends, etc. Her black outs last for days and leave her totally bemused as to what she’s done. In a particularly active black out, she befriends an artist named Ping Xi who finds her mission fascinating and wants to use her as a muse. Our narrator only wants to sleep. Her observation of the outside world, and everyone dialed into it, is scathing.

I’ll hold off describing our narrator’s estranged relationship with her emotionally distant father and her cold, cruel mother. It becomes a pivotal point driving her addiction to avoidance. She does eventually emerge from her chrysalis of sleep, but the novel’s ending leaves much to be desired. It’s bittersweet—anticlimactic and effective, all at once. Just like this whole novel.

Memorable Quotes:

“Education is directly proportional to anxiety.”

“This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was my dream.”

“I felt myself float up and away, higher and higher into the ether until my body was just an anecdote, a symbol, a portrait hanging in another world.”

“But these painters of fruit thought only of their own mortality, as though the beauty of their work would somehow soothe their fear of death. There they all were, hanging feckless and candid and meaningless, paintings of things, objects, the paintings themselves just things, objects, withering toward their own inevitable demise.”

Thanks to NetGalley for my pre-pub copy for an unbiased review.

[kate · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’ll tell you all about it later. I am currently shocked that people read this and had positive feelings - what exactly did they like?

[zuza_zaksiazkowane · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
Książka strasznie dziwaczna i nierówna. Początek mi się podobał, potem środek nieco dłużył, potem końcowe 30 stron było naprawdę świetne a zakończenie historii kiepskie bardzo. I co mam teraz z Tobą zrobić, książko?