“My Year of Rest and Relaxation” Is Stupid & I Hate It

I hated it so much that I don’t want to spend my time recapping it. Instead, I’m going to copy and paste the Wikipedia plot summary to get you up to speed. The novel was written by Ottessa Moshfegh and published in 2018.

The anonymous narrator, a slender and beautiful blonde from a wealthy WASP family, is a recent Columbia University art history graduate grappling with her personal tragedies and the pressures of societal expectations. During her senior year in college, both of her parents died—first her father from cancer, then her mother in a suicide caused by an interaction between psychiatric medications and alcohol. Now residing on Manhattan's Upper East Side and increasingly dissatisfied with her post-collegiate life, the narrator seeks out Dr. Tuttle, a psychiatrist known for her unorthodox methods. Dr. Tuttle readily prescribes a range of sleeping pills, anti-anxiety, and anti-psychotic medications. The narrator, however, intends to spend as few hours awake as possible, numbing herself with a steady regimen of pills and repeatedly watching middlebrow movies on her VCR until the machine finally breaks down.

After being dismissed from her art gallery job, the narrator decides to subsist on her inheritance and unemployment benefits, embarking on a year-long quest to 'reset' her life through extensive sleep. But her "year of rest and relaxation" is regularly interrupted. Her college roommate Reva (who unabashedly envies the narrator's wealth and appearance) makes frequent unannounced visits, which the narrator allows despite her disdain for Reva's social climbing and annoyance at having to listen to Reva's problems—her own mother's terminal cancer, a frustrating affair with her married boss. The narrator is also occasionally in contact with an older boyfriend, Trevor (a banker who works in the World Trade Center), though he frequently cuts off their relationship to date women his own age, returning when one of them has dumped him or occasionally in response to the narrator's pleading.

The narrator initially makes trips out of her apartment only to a local bodega, Dr. Tuttle's office, and the Rite Aid to fill her prescriptions. But as she takes stronger and stronger medications, she begins leaving the apartment in her sleep, among other things to go to nightclubs (or so she gathers from Polaroid photographs and glitter she discovers when she awakes from her multi-day blackout). She also wakes up on a train headed toward the funeral of Reva's mother on New Year's Eve 2000. Convinced these activities—which have no appeal to the narrator in her conscious hours—are disrupting her efforts at complete rest, she decides she needs to sleep locked inside her apartment. She contacts Ping Xi, an artist represented by the gallery where she used to work, who agrees to bring her food and other necessities for four months in exchange for being allowed to make any kind of art project he wishes while she is unconscious: the only requirement is that all trace of him be gone when she wakes every three days to eat, bathe, and take another pill to put herself under again. To prepare, she empties her apartment, giving her designer clothes to the ever-covetous Reva, who has just been dumped by her boss—unaware that she is pregnant, he arranged a promotion that would transfer her out of his office and to the company's office in the World Trade Center. Reva plans to have an abortion; the narrator sleeps until June 1.

She readjusts to life slowly, spending hours over the summer of 2001 sitting in a park and refurnishing her once-expensively decorated apartment with mismatched, used furniture from Goodwill. But as she hoped, her worldview has been transformed by her rest: her contempt for Reva has evaporated and for the first time she earnestly reciprocates her friend's previously insistent declarations that "I love you", though now Reva is the one who has become distant. The narrator calls Reva once more, on her birthday in August, but Reva brushes off the call. They never speak again. On September 11, Trevor is in Barbados on his honeymoon and Reva dies in the terror attack on the World Trade Center. The narrator goes out to buy a new VCR to tape the news coverage, returning as time passes to watch the video, in particular footage of a woman leaping out of the North Tower whom she believes to be Reva.

Now that you know what happened, here’s my summary:

A rich, attractive woman struggles with the death of her parents and the perceived drabness of her post-college life. She has a beautiful and fully paid-for apartment, friends who want to spend time with her, and a job at a hip art gallery. She hates and resents it all. She sees her life as so irreparably broken, meaningless, and empty, that a year of drug-induced sleep sounds better to her than enduring her friends and job. She’s mean, nasty, and selfish. She’s a slob and an addict, a terrible friend and a bad person. She doesn’t learn anything at all by the end of the novel, other than being alive is better than sleeping through life. The book seems to say even when life is shitty, it is better to experience it alive than dead to the world. After sleeping for an entire year, she emerges from her sleep with a new appreciation for nature and an apartment furnished at a second-hand store, and this is supposed to represent radical and meaningful change, and then 9/11 happens. (I mostly dislike 9/11 as a narrative device. It’s usually lazy.) Her best friend, who she was consistently rude, nasty, and cold to, dies in the World Trade Center, and she buys a VCR to rewatch the footage so she can see a woman fall to her death, who she thinks looks like her friend. This is supposed to represent radical and meaningful change. In the end, she doesn’t begin to value her friends or appreciate everything her parents left her, despite being awful parents. No, she feeds birds in parks and thinks about her friend dying in the World Trade Center.

This is a great book for people who enjoy characters who are not only completely unrelatable but also horrible people. This seems to be what positive reviews on Goodreads like about the book: the lead woman isn’t caring, a good friend, or wanting to improve herself. These exact traits are represented in the main character’s best friend, whom she incessantly internally ridicules for being that way. Instead, the main character is selfish and utterly unlikable. Many reviewers seem to feel a sense of “liberation” in the depiction of a woman so far separated from the archetypal representations of femininity; the main character is neither mother nor queen nor witch nor lover. She just sucks.

As a practice in perspective, I sincerely attempted to find a way in which this “liberation” claim could hold its ground. What, exactly, was so liberating about a horrible woman, one who, very importantly, doesn’t exist, but was created to serve a narrative role (as all characters are, ultimately), and whose supposed radical and meaningful change felt so meaningless that I didn’t even realize an apartment furnished at Goodwill was supposed to represent something until plot summaries and Goodreads told me so.

The people who liked the book, who seemed to be overwhelmingly 20-something women, all seemed to like one thing: the main character was a nasty person. She did drugs, ignored her friends, and was rude to strangers. She took sleeping pills and went out to clubs in her sleep. She smoked cigarettes in her bathtub and daydreamed about a man who didn’t think about her at all. She didn’t give a fuck.

The reason “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” resonates with readers is because it’s pornographic. It’s wealth, drug, and glamor depression porn. Readers get to indulge in a nasty person who gets to escape life through wealth and drugs. They escape through a character who can take on the gleam of dysfunction: substance abuse, dead parents, discontentment with work, without suffering any of the real consequences: declining health that requires care she can’t afford, the loss of meaningful relationships, or termination from a job she needs to survive.

“My Year of Rest and Relaxation” brings us a self-indulgent and bitter main character whose nastiness has no legitimate source to readers with perspective. She suffers no consequences but the abstract, emotional ones, the ones many people wish they were afforded the luxury of feeling in their entirety. Her nastiness isn’t liberating. It’s vapid.

Here’s a snippet from one glowing Goodreads that sums up many of the positive reviews well:

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.

I’m not mad that the main character mixed prescription sedatives, had poor personal hygiene, or was a “nasty female character.”

I’m mad that she had nothing that gave her any substance at all, other than being nasty, that her “redemption” arc was barely noticeable in the scheme of the plot, and that the whole thing would have been way more meaningful if she had just slept forever or stayed addicted to sleeping pills or move

d into the childhood home she decided to sell off.

The main character was so empty from the start that a story about her overcoming a year of rest and relaxation didn’t just not resonate— no sound was made in the first place.

“My Year of Rest and Relaxation”

1/5 stars (1 star for fun drug abuse sequences and an absolutely delightful character found in Dr. Tuttle, the psychiatrist. I wish the book had been about her.)