My Year of Rest and Relaxation review

Except my ordeal was from my body fighting off Covid, whereas Moshfegh’s character inflicts this misery upon herself. Running on a cocktail of drugs, the character takes us deeper and deeper into her plan to sleep for a year to heal herself from the traumas of her past.

Moshfegh’s work has always been well praised, with her debut novel Eileen nominated for several awards. Despite being published back in 2018, My Year has since been scooped up as one of the darlings of ‘booktok’ – the community of book lovers on TikTok – and has subsequently branched out to a younger audience.  

Her subconscious takes charge, and causes the exact emotional confrontations that the character is wanting to avoid

In this second novel, Moshfegh takes us back to 2000, a year most of us don’t remember or weren’t even alive for. Kate Moss heroin chic is the style, and the book is set in a time when feminist was still sort of a dirty word, using gay as an insult was perfectly acceptable, and the Twin Towers were still standing. 

Our nameless character – protagonist doesn’t feel like the right word in any sense, she is far from a hero – lives off her inheritance on the Upper East Side of New York. Privileged in society in almost every way, she is still emotionally overwhelmed enough to decide to sleep for a year, hoping to be reborn. But this journey is far from a peaceful slumber into the next year. Her subconscious takes charge, and causes the exact emotional confrontations that the character is wanting to avoid.

Surrounded by an odd ensemble, our main character’s life isn’t as solitary as she makes it seem. Her eccentric and highly dangerous psychiatrist, an envious college best friend concerned for her wellbeing (think Gossip Girl’s Blair and Serena’s vibes), a fuckboy ex, an experimental artist, the ghostly memories of her dead parents, and the Egyptian men at her local bodega fill the lucid moments our socialite experiences. Our lead character is snide, cold, and a pathological liar, written to be darkly humorous enough to offset her general unpleasant demeanour.

A spoiled, troubled socialite living out an experience that is both horribly destructive and economically unfeasible for most kept me entertained for four days

Despite how unlikable she is, our narrator’s story resonates in the era of a mental health crisis. She plays both patient and psychologist, deciding what will heal her, entirely unaided by professional help (her psychiatrist is out of the picture due to the narrator’s constant lies). This is a tale for many in the present day who have to manage their mental health problems alone, as services are stretched beyond their limits. Moshfegh doesn’t guide the reader to a decision on whether you can be both the ailed and a healer, but seems to pose the question ‘is this era of self-soothing and self-care leading us down a slope where we could cause ourselves more harm?’ Are we all just performing self-destruction in the guise of self-care? 

Along with this, Moshfegh is excellent at making anything that should be unbearable become completely captivating. A spoiled, troubled socialite living out an experience that is both horribly destructive and economically unfeasible for most kept me entertained for four days. I could not put the book down – I even read it at midnight on my way back from a bar.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a tale that sounds like anything but a fun read, touching on triggering topics and a character who is neither relatable nor likeable. But, through her excellent writing, Moshfegh reels you into a world so far from our own, keeping it stuck in your mind for weeks. 

We all have days when we just don’t want to get out of bed and face the coming day. The nameless narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, doesn’t just want to stay in bed for the day — she wants to stay in bed for an entire year. And not to watch lame 80s videos or have sex with her horrible lover, as has been her wont.

She wants to be totally unconscious.

“I had started ‘hibernating’ as best I could in mid-June of 2000. I was twenty-four years old. I watched summer die and autumn turn cold and gray through a broken slat in the blinds. My muscles withered.”

Fortunately, she has enough money to take a year off. Unfortunately, she inherited it from a father who “had been eaten alive by cancer,” and a “bedroom drunk” mother who killed herself. It is her unresolved grief and the trauma of growing up with dysfunctional parents that torments her into self-medicating with “upwards of a dozen pills a day,” an amount that increases to a ridiculous litany of dosages as the story progresses.

In order to get those pills, she visits Dr. Tuttle, a mad psychiatrist who can never remember the details of the narrator’s life but is a whiz at prescribing all manner of psychotropic meds and getting insurance to pay for them:

“So I filled prescriptions for things like Neuroproxin, Maxiphenphen, Valdignore, and Silencior and threw them into the mix now and then, but mostly I took sleeping aids in large doses, and supplemented them with Seconols or Nembutals when I was irritable, Valiums or Libriums when I suspected that I was sad, and Placidyls or Noctecs or Miltowns when I suspected I was lonely.”

All the pill-guzzling gets in the way of her job as the front-desk girl at a New York City art gallery and her friendship with the insecure and bulimic Reva. Her carefully curated world begins to collapse when she gets fired for sleeping too much, her VCR breaks, her narcissistic lover finds a real girlfriend, and Reva’s mother dies.

Dr. Tuttle comes to the rescue with Infermiterol, a powerful drug that knocks her out for three days at a time, though instead of sleeping, she’s sleep-living. Like some sort of zombie, her mind is gone but her body lives on.

She realizes that she’s living a parallel life on Infermiterol when she comes to on a train, wearing a white fur coat. She’s on her way to Reva’s mother’s funeral, flowers in hand. “One Infermiterol took days of my life away. It was the perfect drug in that sense.”

Turns out, she’s living the giddy life of an art-scene socialite and has become the muse of a creepy artist whose taxidermied dogs are a hot commodity on the art market. In reality, she scorns the Asian-American artist (Asians get little respect from the narrator), but in alternate-reality, she is the willing subject of his next show, “Large-Headed Pictures of a Beautiful Woman.”

On the surface, the narrator has it all. Her beauty is compared to that of Faye Dunaway and Kim Basinger. She’s wealthy, with an apartment on the Upper East Side, and educated, a graduate of an Ivy League school. She’s the very apotheosis of the American Dream.

But, there is the issue of her mother, who “could make me feel very special, stroking my hair, her perfume sweet and light, her pale, bony hands cool and jangling with gold bracelets, her frosted hair, her lipstick, breath woody with smoke and stringent from booze. But the next moment she’d be in a haze, distracted, suffering from some grave fear or worry and struggling to put up with even the thought of me.”

Her mother is relentlessly critical, pointing out her skin blemishes and the sweat stains under her arms. The narrator notes, “We got along best when we were asleep.” So it’s little surprise when her mother tells her, “You know, when you were a baby, I crushed Valium into your bottle.”

Then there were her parents’ gruesome deaths that came only six weeks apart and the ensuing survivor’s guilt:

“I’d feel sorry for myself, not because I missed my parents, but because there was nothing they could have given me if they’d lived. They weren’t my friends. They didn’t comfort me or give me good advice. They weren’t people I wanted to talk to. They barely even knew me.”

All the emptiness and drugged-up ennui might be a little much if it weren’t for Moshfegh’s trenchant critique and chromatic prose. It is the beauty of her writing and the archness of her observations that keep the reader invested in the narrator’s sorry plight up until the very end.

After her year of pharmaceutical amnesia, it seems as if our narrator might get her happy ending. She symbolically divests herself of her parents’ toxic legacy by selling their house. She reconnects with Reva, making a sincere effort to be a good friend. She appreciates art, nature, and kindness. “Pain is not the only touchstone for growth, I said to myself.”

Ah, but this is not a simple coming-of-age tale. The ending is abrupt, brutal. It says nothing and everything about our narrator’s future, which we realize with horror, is our own as well.

Is My Year of Rest and Relaxation worth reading?

What was the message of My Year of Rest and Relaxation?

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