My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Ottessa Moshfegh, 2018
Contemporary fiction Literary fictionPsychology
A young woman with a trust fund, a psychiatrist, and a plan to sleep for a year—a deadpan satire of self-care and modern numbness. A deadpan, witty voice drifts through a year of sleep, with unease and nostalgia humming under the flat, lyrical surface.
Feels like unease and nostalgia. About nature and memory.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy narrators who are sharp, privileged, and hard to warm to, and satire that stays quiet rather than loud. The deadpan passivity and the long stretch of withdrawal can feel airless, so it suits readers patient with a slow, numb central character.
Why read it
Its pre-smartphone setting makes total withdrawal feel possible, and the wry voice turns self-care into an uneasy mirror. You get a strange comfort in watching someone refuse the world.
A page from the book
What it costs to sleep through a year you don’t want to live.
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. The sheets on my bed yellowed, although I usually fell asleep in front of the television on the sofa, which was from Pottery Barn and striped blue and white and sagging and covered in coffee and sweat stains. Ottessa Moshfegh.The novel is set in 2000, before smartphones made total withdrawal nearly impossible; the narrator can vanish without a ping.
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Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is My Year of Rest and Relaxation for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy narrators who are sharp, privileged, and hard to warm to, and satire that stays quiet rather than loud. The deadpan passivity and the long stretch of withdrawal can feel airless, so it suits readers patient with a slow, numb central character.
- What is My Year of Rest and Relaxation like?
- A deadpan, witty voice drifts through a year of sleep, with unease and nostalgia humming under the flat, lyrical surface. Feels like unease and nostalgia. About nature and memory.
- What should I read after My Year of Rest and Relaxation?
- If you liked My Year of Rest and Relaxation, try The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton), Girl, Interrupted (Susanna Kaysen) and Bunny (Mona Awad).
A taste of the feed
Somewhere along the way, the ordinary laws stopped applying.
But most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening? In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down1 a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest1 and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction. Time, too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks; faces, flowers.
Girl, Interrupted · Susanna Kaysen
The private prayer of anyone who has ever watched a perfect clique from outside.
I quietly prayed for the hug implosion all year last year. That their ardent squeezing might cause the flesh to ooze from the sleeves, neckholes, and A‑line hems of their cupcake dresses like so much inane frosting. That they would get tangled in each other’s Game of Thrones hair, choked by the ornate braids they were forever braiding into each other’s heart‑shaped lit‑ tle heads. That they would choke on each other’s blandly grassy perfume. Never happened. Not once.
Bunny · Mona Awad
What four in the morning does to water, air, and books.
But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o’clock in the morning.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle · Haruki Murakami
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