User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
TL;DR: I fucking hated this book.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation could have been good. I was expecting something like You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine: a weird, disturbing book about a young woman dissociating from modern society. Instead I got 300 pages of vapid bullshit that seems unreasonably proud of itself. If you're here looking for recommendations, I'd give this one a pass and read the Kleeman instead.
Another entry in the baffling 'women can be assholes too!' movement,
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is all smoke and mirrors: Moshfegh is a good enough writer on a sentence level to make it seem like her book is about something, but I can assure you that it is absolutely not. There's so little substance in the actual text that I'm not even sure how to go about this review. I've been reading good reviews all morning to try and figure out what I missed, but a lot of people who wrote positive reviews didn't actually like it either: it's an unpleasant reading experience, and a lot of the book's high ratings seem to be on the dubious merit of that unpleasantness. I wonder if the sunk cost fallacy isn't at work here: if someone published this and someone edited it and someone nominated the author's previous work for awards, then this must be good, right? We wouldn't all have put so much effort into a boring hack. I don't think that writing about nasty people doing nasty things takes any particular skill, though, or that it has intrinsic value - the only skill seems to be in a marketing strategy which has convinced us that if we don't like a book that means it's good, actually.
I'm not sure how to go about this other than by listing this book's apparent strengths, according to its fans:
The characters are so unlikeable!It's probably clear at this point that I don't think writing unlikeable characters for the sake of being able to is very compelling; it seems conceited on the part of the author, and a bit like I'm being invited in on a mean spirited joke. It's strange to me that this is a draw for other readers. I'm glad that Moshfegh has come to the conclusion that rich, pretty people can be unlikeable; I don't have any particular desire to discuss that with her at length.
Moshfegh has a response for complaints like mine, from an interview she did with the Guardian for her novel
Eileen: "When I ask Moshfegh about the reception of the novel, she rails against those who 'want to know in this juicy way why I have written such an unlikable character. I just want to say: ‘How dare you?’' We live in a world in which mass murderers are re-elected, she says, yet it’s an unlikable female character that is found to be offensive: it’s 'sexist and idiotic'."
I think that calling this out as sexist - which is the typical answer, and not a Moshfegh original by any means - is a smokescreen. We're not talking about an actual woman who exists in the world: we're talking about a character that someone intentionally made up. Characters don't end up this horrible by accident, and it's worth questioning why someone sat down and labored over a character so unrealistically nasty. I really don't think there's a good reason, which is why the question is always met with immediate deflection. It seems like a sneaky way for female authors to show how much better and smarter they are than other women while pretending that they're practicing some radical act of feminism.
But it's so weird and dark and disturbing!The narrator was so removed from her own experiences that this didn't read as very dark or disturbing to me, but even if it had, I don't think that's an especially compelling reason to read something. (Incidentally, this is also why I've drifted away from Chuck Palahniuk.) Most of my favorite books this year were disturbing but they were also about something, and that's why I liked them; a book that's trying to be disturbing at the expense of having a plot or even one character that you can empathize with is like a bad jump scare. It works, but it's easy and shallow and forgettable. It takes no particular skill and has no meaning. I've considered that this actually is the point - that books don't have to mean anything, that they can just exist as objects untethered from any deeper philosophical inquiry - but it turns out that is a point after all, it's just a stupid one.
This book is a detailed example of what it is like to be depressed.You know what? Sure, I'll give it this one. Depression makes the world boring and it can make depressed people very difficult to like. I'm not sure that taking a deep dive into "depressed people are self centered and horrible" is a helpful or kind thing to do, but it's at least not wholly inaccurate.
I do take offense at our culture's continued fascination with the idea that people can be both rich and depressed. I realize, as all depressed people do, that depression isn't contingent on our material circumstances: I fucking know that rich people can be depressed. I also know that having money lifts a huge burden off of their shoulders. You can't buy happiness but you can certainly buy therapy, medication, and the time to properly take care of yourself - things which are categorically denied to people who aren't very wealthy or very privileged. I am not the only one who drags my depressed ass to work every day for the privilege of not being able to afford the medication that might make it easier to stay alive, and I do not give a single shit about how depressed rich people may or may not be. Let's all agree to stop telling this story in 2019.
But the writing is so charming and funny!Is it?
The ending is great: it shows that the narrator has grown & changed. Such a punch in the gut! & very uplifting.There is a trite, stupid little chapter after our narrator has come out of her Infermiterol daze where she starts going outside and feeding squirrels corn flakes in the park. I suppose this is meant to show that she has changed; now, she is capable of seeing beauty and engaging with a world outside of herself. It felt shallow and unearned, but perhaps it was meant to feel shallow and unearned, because then the final chapter of this book is a half-page summary of the narrator discovering that her friend Reva died in the World Trade Center on September 11th. She has recorded a video from the news in which a woman leaps to her death from the burning building. The narrator decides to believe that the woman is Reva, and watches the footage over and over, apparently for years. The book's last line, on which people seem to be fairly divided, is this:
There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.This is an incredibly offensive thing to say, made worse because it's also fucking meaningless. I have the sense that Moshfegh thinks she can get away with this by putting it in the mouth of a horrendous character and giving it a clever little twist: our narrator has spent the past year asleep because she can't face the mundanity of her day to day life, but a woman who has leapt to her death from a burning building is really
awake. Do you get it, though? Do you see what she did there? It's a juxtaposition between sleeping and wakefulness and life and death. It's like, you can totally
sleepwalk through life and someone dying can be
truly awake, you know what I mean?
This is exactly the kind of ~*~deep~*~ shit my friends and I used to come up with when we were 19 and stoned; it's a literary version of that 'real eyes realize real lies' nonsense that we used to post on Myspace. It's dumb word play that's purporting to actually mean something and the fact that it's the last line of this fucking stupid book is infuriating to me. Is it supposed to be funny? Ironic? Am I supposed to think that the narrator is a better person, or just the same shithead that she always was but a year older? Is it a treatise on the meaning of the book? Is it just Ottessa Moshfegh having a laugh that the literary establishment has welcomed her trite, boring nonsense with open arms, or am I supposed to be taking this seriously?
This book defies categorization not because it's tricky, clever, or meaningful, but because it's emotionally and thematically empty. It's not about anything and it has nothing to say. It's a series of images strung together to absolutely no end and its strongest selling point is that with its last line it finally engendered a single emotion in me: incredulous rage.
In the same
Guardian interview I mentioned above, Moshfegh said that "[her] writing lets people scrape up against their own depravity, but at the same time it’s very refined … It’s like seeing Kate Moss take a shit." This is a fucking hilariously conceited thing for someone to say, but it also introduces the only worthwhile question I can muster about Moshfegh's work: who is this for? What audience is being allowed to (lol) "scrape up against their own depravity"? I can't say, other than that I'm clearly not a part of it.
When you don't like books like this, people are quick to pin the blame on you: you just don't
get it. Things don't have to be
likeable to be important. Sometimes, though, there's nothing there to get, and being unlikeable doesn't give something intrinsic value. I hate the idea that important literature can't also be fun, and I hate this senseless hackjob of a book.
Rating: really liked it
Well, this one went down nice n' easy, like I imagine an Ambien would.
ADMISSION: I'm a little bit in love with this author, this woman who is often maligned for being
gross and writing about
nasty female characters, for being
deliberately provocative relying solely on
shock value, and oh don't forget, she's just plain
unlikable. All of which makes me say: "SO WHAT?"
Ottessa Moshfegh does write about icky things people do, magnifies the cruel dark bits of life we would rather gloss over. If you need your literature to be overall pleasant and safe, clear of eye gunk and shit and pubic hair, I would give her a wide berth. And that's 100% okay - not every book is for every reader.
But if you're willing to read something dark and dangerous, to laugh at wicked, sardonic humour, to listen to a pitiless, confrontational story, then you are in luck. Plus, that cover. Isn't it fierce?
I felt at home when reading the words in this book. Life is hard! And sometimes many of us wish we could lay our head on the pillow and not wake up for a week or so, thereby avoiding the everyday struggle and banality. Our narrator is tired of her life. She wants to 'hibernate' for one year, and wake up a new person. Not literally a new person - technically she will be the same, but her hope is that she will awake with a brand new outlook. See, her parents died within a few months of each other, and losing them heightened the even more painful, everyday, life-long losses she endured in her family. So even though she's independently wealthy, beautiful and living in Manhattan in the year 2000, she'd rather close her eyes and pass the time in unconsciousness.
She's got an envious, try-hard friend in Reva. She's got Dr. Tuttle, a horrid psychiatrist who enables her pill-popping to the extreme. (Both of these characters are morbidly hilarious.) And she has Trevor, an on-again-off-again relationship that is more abusive than anything else.
Other than that, she's got her drugs, and a VCR with a bunch of Whoopi Goldberg movies.
The pages slide by, in a drugged haze. There's some repetition here: lots of taking pills, watching 80s movies, feeling confused about what might have happened during a blackout, or feeling frustrated at the lack of efficacy of the current chemical cocktail. Never though, did my interest wane. This is a character study expertly rendered. I was watching a person on the very edge of the world, sitting right on the edge, exceptionally alone in her ennui, light as air in her earthly impact. She might just float away, and no one would notice. I understood that existential feeling. And I wanted to know if she would be 'alright'.
Her drugged year ends just before 9/11, which is the most jarring wake-up call Moshfegh could summon.
I recognised a few similarities to Eileen - both protagonists are 24 year old females, drowning in insufferable inner worlds. Both are stories of escape, are ice picks to the heart, are dark as can be. Both feature addiction and characters with image issues and eating disorders. This one, though, is funnier, and, c'mon, even features a paragraph on Mickey Rourke in
9 1/2 Weeks.
This book asks the question of whether we can ever really escape pain. And is anyone ever 'alright'? Probably not, because there's so little we can control. But, confronting life with whatever it brings is the way to live in this world, even if it's jumping off a building. That's where freedom is: being wide, wide awake.
Rating: really liked it
Not to sound like I believe myself to the center of the universe, but...I am and I do and this book was probably written for me.
I, like our protagonist, am a 24-year-old blonde with exactly one toxic but adoring friend who daydreams about the idea of sleeping away a week / month / year and waking up refreshed and renewed and in a slightly different, shinier life.
In college, the aforementioned singular friend and I lived through finals and midterms and forty-hour workweeks combined with internships and full-time course-loads by fantasizing about comas. Just a few weeks or so, no brain damage, modern-day Snow Whites escaping capitalism or the patriarchy or what have you.
All of this is to say that the only thing that separates me from this protagonist is the first two decades of the millennium and the wherewithal to get it done.
Life is painful and exhausting and gross. Life is stained Crate & Barrel couches and intolerable people with trust funds who can't tolerate themselves and caffeine addictions upheld by sh*tty coffee. Life needs pills to get you through it and pills to get you out of it.
But life is also the in-betweens: waking up from blackouts (proverbial or literal) to full-body enjoy a slice of pizza standing in front of your fridge. Feeling the sun on your skin at the end of winter. Sitting in a park and watching people be happy. Calling friends.
And life is knowing that the worst part of it all could be just around the corner, on the very last page. But the best part could come a few after.
And maybe the bad parts are actually the in-betweens of the happy ones.
Bottom line: This book is good.
reread update: Want to note that a) I don't think that you're supposed to like this protagonist, god help me, and b) raising this to a 4.5, might raise further to a 5, because this is not a perfect book but it's close to it for me!
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2nd rereaddepressive episode reading
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reread pre-reviewi have almost no new insight.
still review & rating to come
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reread updatedoing the Bravest thing i can imagine: rereading this less than 3 weeks after i read it for the first time just so i can buddy read with lily (and also hopefully figure out a rating)
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pre-reviewhow could i possibly be expected to sum up this book with a number between 1 and 5?
review & rating to come
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tbr reviewsecretly i hope every book i pick up will turn out to be the kind of depressing, nasty, female-authored literary fiction populated by unlikable young women and Something to Say about the soullessness of late-stage capitalism that changes my internal monologue for 10-14 days and sears disturbing images into my brain.
i have a good feeling about this one.
Rating: really liked it
This is a very accurate depiction of depression—you feel the main character’s monotony, the lethargy, the pointlessness of it all. As someone who copes with depression by sleeping an excessive amount, I understood where she was coming from, and picked up this book out of curiosity to see what happens when someone submits to that nihilistic desire to not associate with the world anymore. The relationship between the main character and her best friend provided an interesting look at both sides of unhappiness: one that is cynical and apathetic and succumbs to inactivity, and one that is shallow positivity to desperately cope with life. I thought this was a unique way of showing different types of depression and how they are alike and different at the same time.
Unfortunately, there were a lot of missed opportunities for the story to be more insightful and memorable beyond the exaggerated experiment of taking a mental health day. Many reviews complain that the main character is deplorable and annoyingly privileged, but I argue that was on purpose. The fault is more so that there wasn’t much done with this purposeful portrayal. I think showing more vulnerability to her character would have added more insight and humanity, especially since she was clearly grieving over her parents and projecting her self-hatred onto her best friend, but there was little payoff for these subplots. (I suppose the lack of payoff is realistic, but I wonder if that justifies a good 300-page novel.) The middle part drags, which makes the tonal shift and tacked-on conclusion towards the end, in contrast, feel too abrupt and heavy-handed.
Rating: really liked it
this was....something else.
this will probably always remain one of the oddest books i’ve ever read. on the surface it is mostly ridiculous, the narrator deciding to just
take a year in the hopes that it will transform her outlook on life. but underneath all that, it is kind of a tender and vulnerable look at a woman who is struggling to deal with her grief and depression and feels that drastic measures are the only way get through.
my only complaint is that things dragged throughout the middle just a bit, which in itself almost lent to the overall lethargy of the story, but the conclusion of the year was rushed (and wrapped up a little too neatly?) and i would have preferred a bit more time to have been focused there.
Rating: really liked it
Listening to this book was like watching Girls.
Occasionally funny and occasionally insightful in a limited, WASP-y kind of way, but mostly ridiculous, privileged, and, ultimately, pointless.
Rating: really liked it
I really really enjoyed this one. I feel like Ottessa Moshfegh let herself loose with a bizarre idea and it totally payed off. I'm still not sure if I liked the main character and I love that. Overall very much recommend!
Rating: really liked it
validated my existence as a lazy whore
Rating: really liked it
it's rare to enjoy both the writing and the concept for a book and then totally hate the execution.
but i don't think that a self obsessed and sort of traumatized WASP giving catty commentary juxtaposed with the idea of sleeping for a year really worked. i certainly wanted it to, but this left me very empty. i think i'm too dumb to really "get" this kind of intellectualism.
Rating: really liked it
I was finally doing something that really mattered. Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation. Whew! I had a surprising reaction to this novel. Ottessa Moshfegh’s
My Year of Rest and Relaxation managed to catch me off guard and by surprise. Probably because – funny story – ironically, this book is about a character who does what I
always say I’d like to do: have the ability to put my life on pause for just a few days to rest, to think, to recharge. Then press a magic button and the world resumes spinning, without me having lost a single second of my life. Wouldn’t that be wonderful! Well, here’s that idea with a twist: Little Miss Nameless Protagonist here does this for an entire year (while strung out on a myriad of different high-level drugs, all while juggling her semi-unwanted friendship with her best friend and her feelings about the death of her parents and the reality of her shitty boyfriend – really, he’s not even that). Set in the year 2000, our narrator decides to hibernate through a year of her life in an attempt to be a new person on the other side of that time. So, with the help of a zany and negligible psychiatrist who’s first and only line of doctoring is to pull out her prescription pad, our narrator dives deeper and deeper into the world of prescription drugs—and the psychological effects of them—in her quest to sleep away a year of her life.
My Ambien, my Rozerem, my Ativan, my Xanax, my trazodone, my lithium. Seroquel, Lunesta. Valium. I laughed. I teared up. Finally, my heart slowed. My hands started trembling a little, or maybe they’d been trembling all along. “Thank God,” I said aloud…I counted out three lithium, two Ativan, five Ambien. That sounded like a nice mélange, a luxurious free fall into velvet blackness. And a couple of trazodone because trazodone weighed down the Ambien, so if I dreamt, I’d dream low to the ground. That would be stabilizing, I thought. And maybe one more Ativan. Ativan to me felt like fresh air. A cool breeze, slightly effervescent. This was good, I thought. A serious rest. My mouth watered. Good strong American sleep.Jacques Louis David’s neoclassical painting has been used as the cover, a reference to our protagonist’s “culture,” of which she is so proud and self-important, and her Art History background in college and before she quit the workforce. It’s a nice touch, offering layers of other meanings to this book. Within these pages you’ll find a slew of wholly unlikeable characters – well, unlikeable by the arbitrary standards we tend to think of as what makes a “nice” or “good” person. You won’t find those people here. Instead you’ll find the nameless narrator who knows she’s gorgeous and privileged and secretly loves the fact that her (bulimic, needy, whiny, having an intra-office affair with a married guy) best friend, Reva, is jealous of her. You’ll find the WASP mother of the nameless protagonist who can’t be bothered to mother but instead calls in the nanny and drinks herself to death in the end. The
artiste who made his claim to fame by ejaculating on a blank canvas in various colors. And we shan’t forget the “boyfriend” who uses our protagonist for quick sexual trysts that work out to only his benefit and then shuns her for weeks or months until he’s ready for another one. She has become semi-dependent on him and this cycle of abuse, even as she hopes that it will one day stop and that he’ll choose her. Their relationship is twisted and not at all the storybook love affair you’re used to:
I called Trevor again. This time when he answered, I didn’t let him say a word. “If you’re not over here fucking me in the next forty-five minutes then you can call an ambulance because I’ll be here bleeding to death and I’m not gonna slit my wrists in the tub like a normal person. If you’re not here in forty-five minutes, I’m gonna slit my throat right here on the sofa. And in the meantime, I’m going to call my lawyer and tell him I’m leaving everything in the apartment to you, especially the sofa. So you can lean on Claudia or whoever when it comes time to deal with all that. She might know a good upholsterer.I hear Moshfegh is a fan of writing about these sorts of characters – characters who need a chaser or two before they’ll go down our throats smoothly. This was my first foray into her works, and I don’t mind that. In fact, that quality is what drew me deeper into this novel once I opened the first page. Moshfegh’s
My Year of Rest and Relaxation doesn’t shy away from the murk and unpleasantness – really, downright offensiveness – inside of us all, that we’re all capable of. In fact, her characters here seem to revel in the way their ickiness makes them better than other people while simultaneously wallowing in it until it nearly drowns them. It’s a bold and scary line for an author to walk, and to see the characters on, but that’s what we love about writers who can pull it off. We all need that shiny mirror of our own spiny imperfections staring back at us from time to time, don’t we?
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is dark and obnoxious, but I loved it. Because, isn’t life that way sometimes? I love characters with bite, maybe a pinch of cruelty in them –
But did I care? I didn’t think so. If Reva’s body was hanging by the neck behind the bath curtain, I might have just gone home.
--I appreciate the layers of characters who aren’t bow-tied in shiny pink ribbons of perfection, happy and grinning stupidly with their perfect teeth and empty heads. I like a character who is…shall I say, more like a real person, imperfections and all. Honestly, I felt like this book was WASPy done well – and I don’t think I’ve ever
said that before. Even as she stood at the edge of reality, possibly even the precipice of her life, I was able to forget that her feeling of ennui with her privilege
annoyed me. I wanted to reach out my hand to her, hoping she’d be okay:
I wondered if I might be dead, and I felt no sorrow, only worry over the afterlife, if it was going to be just like this, just as boring. If I’m dead, I thought, let this be the end. The silliness. At some point I got up to guzzle water from the tap in the kitchen. When I stood upright afterward, I started to go blind. The fluorescent lights were on overhead. The edges of my vision turned black. Like a cloud, the darkness came and rested in front of my eyes. I could move my eyes up and down, but the black cloud stayed fixed. Then it grew, widening. I buckled down to the kitchen floor and splayed out on the cold tile. I was going to sleep now, I hoped. I tried to surrender. But I would not sleep. My body refused. My heart shuddered. My breath caught. Maybe now is the moment, I thought: I could drop dead right now. Or now. Now. But my heart kept up its dull bang bang, thudding against my chest…
But this novel’s ending is what sealed the deal for me, culminating with 9/11 shortly after our protagonist wakes from her year of sleep. The towers come down, someone she knows dies, and maybe – just maybe – that last line of the novel shows that our protagonist has finally found her humanity. I highly recommend this book to readers who like their characters straight with no chaser--to readers who don't shy away from some of the darker hues of humanity. If you're uncomfortable with that notion, definitely stay away! I was glued to this novel from start to finish, and that resonating ending easily solidified the strong 4 stars I’m offering up. ****
I received an advance-read copy of this book from the publisher, Penguin, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
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Rating: really liked it
*i received an ARC of this novel through a Goodreads giveaway. which i suppose means final text is still subject to change but i wouldn't get my hopes up.
what a dreadful waste of words. i guess i'm glad the middle of the novel so sedated me in its banality that the utterly cheap 9/11 conclusion was merely offensive rather than absolutely enraging.
moshfegh is clearly a talented writer, and her entertaining wit sneaks through in moments throughout the novel. one only hopes that she will one day free her talents from the shackles of stereotypical MFA melodrama.
Rating: really liked it
Mild spoilers ahead. Also, this is a rant review.This is the stupidest book I've ever hated. It's been a while since a book filled me with unbridled rage. Perhaps I was due since my last loathsome read was almost a year ago with Wonder Boys which I referred to as well-written swill. Unfortunately,
My Year of Rest and Relaxation couldn't even be arsed to give me beautiful prose.
The story starts with a spoiled white rich bitch who is somehow unhappy. Because as we all know kids, happiness comes from youth, thinness, graduating from a posh school and an Upper East Side apartment. Read the blurb if you don't believe me. I was intrigued by the idea of a misanthropic depressed woman who decides to sleep her life away. When she showed a disdain for phone calls,
I'd wake up to find voice messages on my cell phone from salons or spas confirming appointments I'd booked in my sleep. I always called back to cancel, which I hated doing because I hated talking to people
I thought I would find part of her relatable. The thought didn't last.
For a few more pages I really thought I could find a thread linking me to this tragic woman who has everything many people would only dream of but she was suffering from ennui. I thought she was in grief. I thought she was actually diagnosed with depression. She seemed to have an air of vulnerability from the world around her.
I steered clear of anything that might pique my intellect or make me envious or anxious. I kept my head down.
But again, this was just a tantalising glimpse at what could have been a harrowing story about turning yourself inside out to escape your own demons. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, this book was about a disgusting selfish woman who slept a year away.
And this book wouldn't hold back on the disgust. In one scene she gets fired from her fake stupid art job and decides to shit in the gallery and stuff the Kleenex she used to wipe her ass in the mouth of a dog taxidermy sculpture. And this book didn't shy away from shit motifs. One would wonder if Otessa was on one of the many hallucinogens mentioned in this book while watching Shrek and thought to herself, that's what I need to make this story raw. Poo!
The story was full of pseudodeep quotes like
Studied grace is not grace
or
Having a trash chute was one of my favorite things about my building. It made me feel important, like I was participating in the world. My trash mixed with the trash of others. The things I touched touched things other people had touched. I was contributing. I was connecting.
Is this book for real? Yes.
Yes it somehow is. Aside from the narrator's lack of humanity or at least basic human decency, which is only emphasized by how she'd act vaguely nice during her blackouts, the other things I found discomfiting about her is her obsession with Whoopi Goldberg whom she even calls her hero.
Whoopi Goldberg was my main hero. I spent a lot of time staring at her on screen and picturing her vagina. Solid, honest, magenta. Whoopi deserves a better class of admirer.
Perhaps the book had a level of self-awareness, but at this point it had to be accidental. When the narrator decides to collaborate with an "artist" to document the final six months of her year of rest and bullshit, she decribes him as
He wasn’t interested in understanding himself or evolving. He just wanted to shock people. And he wanted people to love and despise him for it.
Sigh. Kill me now.
The only faintly likable character is the narrator's "best" friend Reva. The narrator introduces her in satirical fashion that grinds my gears because it shows how much potential this book squandered for the sake of shock value and a rushed ending.
Reva could never soberly admit to any desire that was remotely uncouth. But she wasn’t perfect. “She’s no white lily,” as my mother would have said. I’d known for years that Reva was bulimic. I knew she masturbated with an electric neck massager because she was too embarrassed to buy a proper vibrator from a sex shop. I knew she was deep in debt from college and years of maxed-out credit cards, and that she shoplifted testers from the beauty section of the health food store near her apartment on the Upper West Side.
The narrator's therapist seemed like a potential source of dark humor but I didn't have the energy to laugh. After the narrator reminds the therapist for the umpteenth time that her mother died of an overdose, she says
“People like your mother,” Dr. Tuttle replied, shaking her head, “give psychotropic medication a bad reputation.” What has my life come to?
I don't know what I was expecting when I came into this. The first few pages seemed promising but I began to have my optimism wane when I realized how simplistic the writing is, not for accessibility, but for fake deepness. Nobody is likable in this story and that's not necessary but did everyone have to be these drifting apparitions (there was no depth to these characters whatsoever) that tried to be as nasty as possible? Was misanthropy the new black? Why was the narrator so disrespectful to people who hadn't earned it?
The book could have explored themes of depression, extrapolating on the meaning of existence, how to add meaning to life but like Addie LaRue it had to be yet another bland serving of the unbearable lifestyles of the white and boring. At one point there's the advice that
Sun exposure promotes cellular collapse. I would argue that this book almost caused my brain to collapse. If you care, sleeping the year away helped the narrator. Towards the end she reveals
Mine was a quest for a new spirit.
And it succeeds I guess because the story ends with her saying
Pain is not the only touchstone for growth, I said to myself. My sleep had worked. I was soft and calm and felt things.
I am not soft. I am not calm. I am rage.
Fuck this book and everything it stands for.
For a book about a self-destructive woman who goes through meaningful change, read Luster instead.
Rating: really liked it
Audiobook...read by Julia Whelan
Questions I had were:
“Are there really psychiatrists this bad?”
and who has friends like Reva?
My biggest question of all:
how would this funny ( ok, ‘tragic’-comic), but still laughable to me - fascinating fantasy- possibly end for our ‘girl-in-hibernation’? I was curious as hell.
I enjoyed the journey to the end too - the dialogue- the absurdity!
I’m thankful I never felt anxious or addicted to binge read this one. My breaks - were powerful. I was often still engaged thinking about the characters and their choices.
I’d love to know what inspired Ottessa to write it.
“How would a REAL - FULL-YEAR-TIME-OUT transform - heal- and empower me?
Limited TV: (Whoopi Goldberg and Harrison Ford
were favorites for our narrator) ...
No social media - no crazy psychiatrist or friends like Reva coming over???
A full year to REST??
I could do without the drugs - thank you - but I’d get massages - and spend time in nature....
It’s a great fantasy- a year off to rest and relax.
I’d like to bring Paul with me though. 🙂
Imagine .....NO MONEY CONCERNS - and a full year off the grid. How would you plan your year?
I stretched-out my reading weeks with Ottessa’s book - unlike when I listened to “Eileen”...
I liked ‘this’ book, too, just as much - they’re very different though. I didn’t feel the urgency to rush - in fact I held back - not because I didn’t enjoy it. I enjoyed it in small doses. Owning it allowed me the luxury to listen while taking as long as I wanted to finish it .....‘resting & relaxing’.
Soaking in the warm pool while listening to this audiobook was decadent and definitely relaxing!!!!
A full 5 stars from me....
I’m clear it wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea ... but in a strange way- it comforted me.
Rating: really liked it
Review from Hello Yellow Room.
Someone standing in line with Otessa Moshfegh at a Starbucks must have said aloud “I’m not sure there’s a novel that sufficiently embraces apathy brought about by woeful depression,” and Otessa said, “Hold my latte.” If that’s not a factual depiction of how this novel was conceived, then my new favorite author Ms. Moshfegh herself can come correct me. I wouldn’t mind.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a unique twist on the classic metamorphosis tale. Written to take place in the year 2000-2001, it’s a novel based heavily in our transition from 1990’s affluence and innocence and relative ease, into the early 2000’s height of terrorism and anxiety. Our narrator, nameless, lifeless, thin, beautiful, rich, orphaned, plans on spending a year in hibernation to sleep away her emotions, wrapped up in a cocoon of colorful pharmaceutical helpers. She finds herself a quack psychiatrist, Dr. Tuttle (hilariously rife with terrible advice), to prescribe her every sleep aid on the market. She takes her apathy in extreme doses, a perfect prescription for a privileged white female in the midst of a foggy depression. Our narrator is as completely disinterested with herself as she is in the rest of the world, which impresses me in a way I can’t put my finger on. I’ve rarely come across a character in literary fiction so uninterested in themselves.
Juxtaposed with our narrator is her best friend from college, the sweet and try-hard Reva. Desperate to fit in, bulimic, chasing trends and having affairs with bosses, Reva is the stereotypical antithesis to our apathetic heroine. She issues Oprah-book-club axioms and sophomoric attempts at psychoanalysis, trying to establish a connection with our narrator, to no avail. In the end, her frantic running around attempting to change herself is just as ineffectual as the narrator’s standing still.
The plot, or lack thereof, rides a strange dream-like quality of repetition and haziness. Our narrator begins to black out and do things without her waking knowledge; she throws parties, goes on shopping binges, duct tapes her phone to odd places, harasses her old boyfriends, etc. Her black outs last for days and leave her totally bemused as to what she’s done. In a particularly active black out, she befriends an artist named Ping Xi who finds her mission fascinating and wants to use her as a muse. Our narrator only wants to sleep. Her observation of the outside world, and everyone dialed into it, is scathing.
I’ll hold off describing our narrator’s estranged relationship with her emotionally distant father and her cold, cruel mother. It becomes a pivotal point driving her addiction to avoidance. She does eventually emerge from her chrysalis of sleep, but the novel’s ending leaves much to be desired. It’s bittersweet—anticlimactic and effective, all at once. Just like this whole novel.
Memorable Quotes: “Education is directly proportional to anxiety.”
“This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was my dream.”
“I felt myself float up and away, higher and higher into the ether until my body was just an anecdote, a symbol, a portrait hanging in another world.”
“But these painters of fruit thought only of their own mortality, as though the beauty of their work would somehow soothe their fear of death. There they all were, hanging feckless and candid and meaningless, paintings of things, objects, the paintings themselves just things, objects, withering toward their own inevitable demise.”
Thanks to NetGalley for my pre-pub copy for an unbiased review.
Rating: really liked it
“I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.”I too would like to sleep for a year.
