“I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.”
My Year of Rest and Relaxation was a book that had been on our radars for an age. From its outrageous premise of an affluent woman deciding to opt out of an entire year to its flashy BookTok-viral cover, it’s just one of those reads that was impossible to ignore. We’ve been reading a fair amount of quirky tales with more than a pinch of nihilism, but how did Ottessa Moshfegh’s bestseller stack up both on its own merits and within this genre? Join us today at What We Reading as we run you through all our thoughts on whether or not this darkly comedic, socially scathing novel is worth its hype!
Date Published: 2018
Author: Ottessa Moshfegh
Genre: Literary Fiction
Pages: 289
Goodreads Rating: 3.60/5
My Year Of Rest And Relaxation Summary
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. Yet 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 very 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, Ottessa Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation and isolation can be.
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What Worked
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is darkly funny, sharply observant, and strangely relatable. This was our first time reading Moshfegh, and we were immediately enthralled by her voice – cynical, compelling, and able to find the funny even in profound despair.
The narrator’s (always unnamed) passive, privileged, yet unimaginably flawed perspective offers one of the most unique lenses we’ve had not just for this story, but across all the books we’ve read this year. You get a sense of her dysfunction without necessarily having to like her (and believe us when we say that a lot of people really won’t); and yet, there was something about her charm that we couldn’t help but come to love.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation balances the heavy themes of depression, trauma, and existential malaise with wicked humour and absurd situations – from idolising Whoopi Goldberg to awkward porn sessions. This mix makes the narrator’s pronounced misery both entertaining and relatable. Also, shoutout to Dr Tuttle for being one of the funniest and deranged characters we’ve read this year – she does plenty of the heavy lifting for the book’s humour.
On top of that, the depiction of burnout as a central theme still feels timely and remarkably relatable.
What Didn’t
With all of that said, it would have been swell if Moshfegh had spared a fair few more lines on certain aspects. The narrator’s privilege, whilst certainly evident, could have been explored and emphasised more to show just how absurdly she’s able to conduct this self-imposed sleeping experiment.
Her relationship with Reva, while compelling, could have benefitted from a bit more bite – a little more vitriol from Reva would have heightened their tension even further.
Honestly, though, we’re clutching at straws here. If you don’t like stories with despicable, morally-flawed protagonists, we can’t guarantee that you’ll have a good time with My Year of Rest and Relaxation. But you probably knew that already.
Wrap Up
My Year of Rest and Relaxation follows a young woman living in New York at the turn of the millennium who, fuelled by wealth and nihilism for the world, decides to “reset” her life by attempting to sleep for as much as possible over the span of a calendar year.
Guided (or misled) by an “eccentric” psychiatrist and an ever-expanding cocktail of prescription drugs, she withdraws from the world in the hopes that total erasure will (somehow) make her whole again. Through this experiment in self-annihilation, Ottessa Moshfegh explores depression, grief, privilege, and the desire to opt out of a society that feels hollow and exhausting.
What makes My Year of Rest and Relaxation such a compelling read is Moshfegh’s voice: cynical, darkly funny, and unflinchingly sharp. The narrator is unbelievably flawed, often unlikable, and yet strangely magnetic, and the book’s blend of absurd humour and emotional bleakness keeps the story both readable and unexpectedly entertaining.
Underneath what appears to be an outlandish premise lies a surprisingly resonant depiction of burnout and despair, one that feels eerily familiar to the majority of us.
Overall, we loved the book for its boldness, its humour, and its ability to turn profound misery into something thoughtful, incisive, and hard to forget.
Our Rating: 4.5/5
Part-time reader, part-time rambler, and full-time Horror enthusiast, James has been writing for What We Reading since 2022. His earliest reading memories involved Historical Fiction, Fantasy and Horror tales, which he has continued to take with him to this day. James’ favourite books include The Last (Hanna Jameson), The Troop (Nick Cutter) and Chasing The Boogeyman (Richard Chizmar).
