“My Year of Rest and Relaxation”, Ottessa Moshfegh
Published July 10, 2018
A novel about a young woman’s efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes.
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?
“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.”
Who doesn’t love an unhinged, unreliable narrator once in a while? Our unnamed toxic queen in Manhattan is doing everything in her power to do the absolute least, to the point where she makes it her goal to literally sleep through a year of her life.
Reading this book (majority at work, outside, during my breaks) felt like watching a beautiful, narcissistic trash fire burn in slow motion while nodding and whispering, she makes some good points. I loved this book. I loved it with the kind of love that is morally questionable—like I shouldn’t have related to the narrator just as much as I did, and yet here I am, physically restraining myself from purchasing a prescription-strength nap plan. She’s selfish, delusional, emotionally bankrupt, casually cruel, and…somehow perfect? She is the unreliable narrator of my dreams. A girlboss of the nihilistic arts.
My paperback, now a rainbow war zone of sticky tabs—not for any deep literary insight; just every page making me cackle about something feral and unhinged. The whole vibe is “I hate everyone and I sleep 20 hours a day and yet I am the moment.” Nothing really happens and everything happens.
You don’t read this book to root for her, clearly. You read it to descend into a medicated, art-world-adjacent fugue state where you can pretend that sleep will cure your existential dread. Ottessa Moshfegh handed me an apathetic antihero and said, “Watch this crazy bitch do nothing, and feel everything.”
FUN FACT: The cover is an oil painting titled “Portrait of a Young Woman in White“ from c. 1798 by an unknown artist. The original painting shows a nipple, but it has been removed in the book cover.
Content Warnings
Note: This is not an exhaustive list of content and trigger warnings.
drug abuse • eating disorder • death of parent • addiction • toxic friendships • suicidal thoughts
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Owned: paperback from Capital Books on K