A Review of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

“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.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

For the longest time, since it came out three years ago with a splash, I’ve been hearing so much about this book. Everyone talks about how they love it so much, how the main character is so relatable. The main character, in a nutshell, is mixing all of these drugs from her quack psychologist so she can sleep for a year. This girl is extremely self-destructive, but we do get hints of the real reason why throughout the novel.

I thought the cover was a great decision for this novel. That’s the first thing I’m going to say, because our main character is this vapid WASP girl living off of her rich parent’s inheritance while living in New York City. She graduated from Columbia with a degree in art history, but then her parents both died her senior year. Her father died of cancer and her mother killed herself. And so she was left with everything, but, in actuality, she doesn’t have anything.

Let’s dive deeper into this concept, shall we?

Book Blurb

From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, 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?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.

Content / Writing

Our main character is too perfect, minus the habit of mixing drugs to get an eternal sleep and her dead family. Maybe that’s why the only other characters in the novel don’t actually like her; they like the concept of her. She is hung up over a man named Trevor, who is about ten years old than her, in a cushy job at the Twin Towers, and he has sex with basically a lot of girls, including our narrator.

She seemingly is desperately in love with him, but he ditches her again and again for other girls but comes back when she pleads for him.

The other character worthy of a name is Reva, her best friend from Columbia. Reva wants to be our main character. We see hints of eating disorders, wanting to be rich, etc. coming from Reva, and our main character embodies everything she wants to be. Minus the dead parents, as when Reva’s own mother dies she is struck with immense grief.

We see the quack psychologist in scenes throughout, a woman who keeps prescribing all of these dangerous meds and is highly questionable in her approach to her practice. Our main character doesn’t care though; she, too, is exploiting the therapist, choosing to lie and play up her nightmares in order to get stronger doses of meds so she can sleep longer.

Her intent is that if she managed to just disappear and sleep for an entire year, then she will be able to start over fresh. It’s kind of sad, in a way, because this girl has no purpose in life and can just sleep it away and not missing anything. She doesn’t really have anyone, nor will many miss her.

The writing in this was insanely good; Moshfegh is quite delicate in her descriptions and really gets into this unlikable woman’s head. And she does it in a way that works, especially considering how much we dislike the main character at the end of the day.

****SPOILER TIME***

I think, in a way, the ending to this novel is the main character getting the break that she wanted. Reva dies in 9/11 and the only other chain holding her back, Trevor, is married. Our narrator is given the golden opportunity to change her life, but we end right there being informed that Reva has died in the terrorist attack.

It is mentioned off-handedly, in a detached manner, that Trevor is on his honeymoon when this happens and was not in the towers when it occurred. It’s an open-ended question, though, if she’ll take this opportunity. She has the money and no strings left on her that keep her from acting.

Overall Thoughts

I wanted to like this novel, but I just absolutely could not stand the narrator and the life she was choosing to live and so that made this a painful read. I kept stopping and picking it back up again because I was so irritated.

But I get why the main character is the way she is; she had parents that should have never been parents, her father dies of cancer her senior year, then not too long after that her mother, who is depicted as an extremely cold and selfish woman, kills herself mixing sedatives and alcohol.

When you come from broken homes and backgrounds, you tend to have a different perspective of the world and how you navigate it. She’s also clearly depressed and unable to enjoy the things she does have in life, which is terribly sad to read about.

But, at the end of the day, I found myself wondering this about the book: what was I supposed to take away from it? That wasn’t as clear, but then the ending also feels kind of rushed and a little too open-ended for me. The 9/11 bits seem like an afterthought to the actual plot, since they’re jus tacked onto the final pages.