Title: My Year of Rest and RelaxationAuthor: Ottessa Moshfegh
First Published: July 10, 2018
Publisher: Penguin Press
Pages: 304
Genre: Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Mental Health Fiction, Satire
Format: Hardcover
Source: Library
Rating:
Synopsis:
From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes
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. But 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 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, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.
Get the Book: AmazonReview
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a grotesquely funny book, compulsively readable despite not having a strong plot. The story centers on a depressed and disaffected young woman that quits her job and spends a year in what amounts to a drug induced coma, with the goal of “waking up” renewed with a new lease on life. This all is made possible thanks to an inheritance and a certain degree of privilege.
The book is a razor sharp satire about upper-class apathy, the pretentiousness of the wealthy New York art scene, and America’s wellness industry and culture of overconsumption. Throughout the book she speaks to her therapist who cares very little about her client and readily prescribes heavy medication. The narrator’s dangerous over-medicated escape from reality is delusionally reframed as “rest.”
This book is also a commentary on the time period, and it is a fiercely feminist novel. The narrator is angry, and her journey of self annihilation is a complete rejection of modern expectations of women to be soft, empathetic, to be likeable. Her self isolation is occasionally interrupted by her one friend, Reva. In stark contrast to the narrator’s complete isolation, Reva is living in the moment, struggling with the drama of modern womanhood, working and having an affair with her boss and dealing with insecurity. The controversial ending I found to be fitting, the closing of a chapter as the narrator is startled “awake.”
Quote
“I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.”
Content Warnings
View Spoiler »About the Author
About Ottessa Moshfegh
Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Death in Her Hands, her second and third novels, were New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World and a novella, McGlue. She lives in Southern California.
Discover more from Radical Dreamer
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
