My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh is so commonly listed under standard lists of edgy or dark fiction recommendations that when I first picked it up a couple of years ago, I thought there was no way I would enjoy it. But if nothing else, I am a complainer and someone who has an ego the size of the sun, so if I am going to criticize something, I am going to know what I am talking about. Happy to report that my initial assessment was wrong and that, by and large, Ottessa Moshfegh is one of my favorite authors, and I highly recommend her work as a whole. But the reason I say all of this is because the very premise of the book has been something I have recently connected to.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation follows a nameless young woman in early 2000s NYC who has it all. She is a trust-fund baby, a Columbia graduate, thin and gorgeous, and has flocks of admirers. And yet she is entirely and completely miserable. So what is a girl to do but try to destroy her current concept of self through a delirious drug cocktail to try and come out the other side, not depressed and with some semblance of a purpose in life? With the help of perhaps the quackiest of psychiatrists prescribing her stronger and stronger sleeping pills, she aspires to sleep for an entire year, or at least not be conscious of any of it.
What makes the novel itself so interesting to me is its relationship with time. When you are as privileged as our protagonist, to the point that nothing you do (or do not do) in life affects the vague greyness of your existence, time takes on an entirely different meaning. When she had a friend and when she did not, when she briefly met her ex when, she became the embodiment of shock value art. Not days, weeks, or months, but rather her year is marked with events like these, and events like waking up and suddenly there is snow, or flowers blooming, and so on. Things that, when we wake up and see them, feel marvelous are nothing more than markers that she has continued to exist. Nothing is significant to him, and everything is this vague grey slab of time that she wants to skip through and somehow emerge better.
The ending is particularly striking, given how the novel went up to that point. It is impossible to make heads or tails about whether what occurred was for the better or worse. As a reader, you don’t know whether you want things to be better or worse for the protagonist either. She is deeply unlikeable because we are stuck in her vapid-faux intellectual head, but she is not an annoying character. She is just a disastrous train wreck from which you cannot turn away. I will not give any more spoilers. However, I will say the reason I have been thinking about this novel is that I have freshly recovered from sleeping 12 hours a day, several days in a row. I got a nasty case of a cold going around and spent the entirety of last week asleep in bed, with only my roommates marking the passage of time. So, if you want a similar experience to being briefly comatose and then coughing your lungs out in a fun way, read My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh.
