My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE 2019**
**A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' TOP BOOK OF 2018**

A shocking, hilarious and strangely tender novel about a young woman's experiment in narcotic hibernation, aided and abetted by one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature. Our narrator has many of the advantages of life, on the surface. Young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn't just the loss of her parents in college, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

This story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs, designed to heal us from our alienation from this world, shows us how reasonable, even necessary, that alienation sometimes is. Blackly funny, both merciless and compassionate - dangling its legs over the ledge of 9/11 - this novel is a showcase for the gifts of one of America's major young writers working at the height of her powers.

• ISBN10: 1787330419
• ISBN13: 9781787330412
• Publish Date: 12 July 2018 (first published 10 July 2018)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 8 April 2021
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Vintage Publishing
• Imprint: Jonathan Cape Ltd
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 304
• Language: English

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.