My Year of Rest and Relaxation: A Novel

by Ottessa Moshfegh

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time, NPR, Vice, Bustle, The New York Times, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Entertainment Weekly, The AV Club, & Audible

A New York Times Bestseller • New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century 

“One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years: a loopy, quietly furious pillhead whose Ambien ramblings and Xanaxed b*tcheries somehow wend their way through sad and funny and strange toward something genuinely profound.” — Entertainment Weekly

“Darkly hilarious . . . [Moshfegh’s] the kind of provocateur who makes you laugh out loud while drawing blood.” —Vogue

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.

• ISBN10: 0525522131
• ISBN13: 9780525522133
• Publish Date: 25 June 2019 (first published 10 July 2018)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Penguin Putnam Inc
• Imprint: Penguin USA
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 304
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780525522133

Reviews

[laughingrachel]

Nothing wrong with the writing itself really, just not to my personal reading tastes at all.

[clementine]

I was not completely sold on this one! I thought it would affect me emotionally more than it did. I'm very open to female narrators who are gross/crass/unlikeable, and I was interested in how completely disinterested the narrator is in her own life, but it was so hard to connect with anybody that I never quite felt pulled in to the book. There is a lot of repetition, and not just in the narrator's actions (pop pills/watch TV/hate every minute she spends with her only "friend"/see her horrendously negligent shrink), but in some of the language. (She "sucks down" coffee multiple times.) I liked the acerbic narrative style, but the writing wasn't quite as sharp as I'd hoped for. Brilliant, precise writing can make an otherwise banal narrative come alive, and while it's clear to me that Moshfegh is a good writer, I wouldn't exaggerate her talent. I was wavering between three and four stars until the end, which managed to be both cheap and predictable. (I'm not sure you could set a novel in New York in 2001 and not have people immediately think of 9/11!) I thought this was going to be more difficult, give me something to really sink my teeth in, and instead it ended up being an easy read that I never fully connected with.