A review by starryybella
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

challenging dark funny reflective tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

If you read books to relate to the characters or “be friends” with the characters, steer clear of this book.
One sentence can be used to describe this book: It’s basically about a white woman white womaning.
This uncomfortable, crude, dissociative, and nihilistic escape of reality has no close substitute for it. I don’t know where to really begin.
The story follows our unnamed narrator, a blonde, thin, beautiful white woman who just graduated from Columbia and is living off of her parents’ inheritance. She is in pursuit of her “year of rest and relaxation”, given the title of the book, and accomplishes this by taking a profuse amount of drugs prescribed by a quack of a psychiatrist (who oddly resembles a drug dealer, and is one in the quite literal, legal sense). She only finds catharsis through sleep - it’s one of the only times she remembers ever bonding with her mother, by napping with her. This is her “transformation” into a new person, to come out as refreshed as ever. 
About ninety percent of the book is about our narrator sleeping. However, Moshfegh is able to make this cyclical drug haze interesting and in a strange way, both readable and unreadable. She makes you feel like you’re the one in this drug-induced drowsiness
Moshfegh has this distinct characteristic in her books about having unlikeable characters in them - and it makes her books all the more interesting to read. 
Our narrator knows she’s privileged in almost every way. She doesn’t care. In fact, she takes advantage of that privilege for her own benefit, and is cruel to people because her privilege and denial or brushing off to accept she has trauma. She’s shallow and can disregard what’s happening in the real world while in pursuit of paradise through sleep.
That made it uncomfortable to read. Not necessarily unreadable, but I couldn’t do it in one sitting. I felt disgust to the core.
And I didn’t feel pity for the narrator either - but you aren’t supposed to. They’re supposed to be repulsive, as Moshfegh confirmed in an interview with the New Yorker.
However, as unlikeable as the narrator was, she was realistic in the sense that because she was so privileged. She had a unique air about her and had this very specific kind of cruelty and projection to everyone around her that only the privileged could ever experience. This is a common theme I seem to read in people who are conscious about their privilege in many aspects.
Because of this privilege and very narrow mindset and priorities, she has this unbearable habit of projecting herself onto everyone around her; more specifically, she does this with her bulimic best friend Reva, who deserved better. The main feeling this evoked for me was pity for Reva for not having a better friend and because she was going through so much, this made her the target of a lot of the narrator’s anger.
I’m repeating myself, but again, disgust. 
“My Year of Rest and Relaxation” also hits on aspects of depression, grief, and trauma that make it all the more realistic. The narrator refuses to accept, it seems, that the indifference her parents treated her with is considered trauma, and instead brushes it off. She never got a chance to grieve her father, and much less her mother. Her depression renders her motivation-less, causing her to want to sleep all the time - She even gets fired from her job at a New York art gallery by drugging herself up and falling asleep in the janitor’s closet. Repeatedly.
What I can appreciate about this book is the fact it doesn’t romanticize depression and portrays it in an extreme, but realistic light of how much of a blow it can be to someone’s perception of reality and of the world around them.
This wanting an escape from how awful reality is, through sardonic humor and monotonous actions, really struck a chord with me. I will say, readers have to be in the right headspace to read this book. I wasn’t really in said headspace when I picked this book up, but in retrospect, that probably gave me more perspective on the book’s meaning, as well as a morbid, unique fascination with this book.
Apart from the narrator, which is the main focus of the book, I have three other problems with “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” that are more minor, but prominent details in the book.
I feel like it’s most likely meant to be a satire on medical professionals, specifically psychiatrists, in the early 2000’s. I can use context clues to imply that, even if I wasn’t alive. However, the fact it was released in 2018 and used this one caricature of a medication-slinging psychiatrist as the face of mental health professionalism in the book really pissed me off to no end.
Secondly, the racism in this book, although not laced throughout the whole book, has sudden appearances that also did not fail to make me livid. I’ll leave it at that, because I don’t even feel like upsetting myself all over again by describing the comment that really made me appalled.
Last but not least, sorry, but what the f–k was that ending? It didn’t sit right with me what happened, as well as it feeling very tacked-on and rushed. I felt that without the last page, the narrator was somewhat reconcilable. It’s what knocked my review from four stars to three and a half stars.
I liked this book but I didn’t at the same time. It’s going to take me a little while longer to clarify my feelings on the narrator and the book.
Expand filter menu Content Warnings