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 … 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.
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An astonishingly good novel about a young woman’s plan to hibernate in her apartment for a year, sleeping all the time (with the help of various prescription medicines) in an attempt to heal herself and “take some time off” from the outside world. Easily one of my favorites this year — sharp, weird, very funny, and hypnotically page-turning.
When we are recommended a book we usually ask, “What is it about?” But with Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (out July 10 from Penguin), we ask, “What isn’t it about?” This novel takes on self-hatred, feminism, sexuality, mental health, family, and big pharma — AND it’s really f*cking funny. I don’t even want to tell you too much because I went in blind, loving Ottessa from her novel Eileen (also worth a read) and found myself hooting and hollering, vibing on a very different tip than her other work put me on. I’m so impressed that just one lady has written all these very special different things. Also, this book cover will have you kissing millennial pink goodbye and walking over to hot pink’s corner. About time!
If you’re looking for The Bell Jar of the modern age, look no further than My Year of Rest and Relaxation. As the main characters finds herself utterly stuck in life — uninspired, uninvolved, and tragically unable to cope with the loss of her parents — she embarks on a drug-induced hibernation. Her feverish experiences and withdrawal from the world take us into the depths of human loss, and bring us back to the surface with love and friendship.
Although much of this story is truly tragic, the dark humor and witty observations keep the novel alive and transformative. Highly recommended, but certainly not for the faint of heart.
B o r i n g
In all honesty, this book highly depressed me but also made me consider more what I want to do with MY LIFE as opposed to just sitting around, wishing I was doing this or that, basically a hopeless and directionless aim of life. All the character did was hit hard on drugs and sleep. Everyone deals with depression in their own way and I guess I have to accept that this was someone’s way of coping even though it doesn’t settle with me entirely.
I like stories like this about intense people who do fantastical things that I will/could never do (i.e. try to sleep a year away).
Good if you’re the introverted stay-at-home type.
This book is about being fed up with the world and what it has to offer. I think there’s beauty in acknowledging that sometimes we really do feel that way. This book inspired me to journal and explore my own emotions and desires.
Unique
Depressing, unrealistic, girl blanks out a year of her life with drugs, supposedly to be refreshed when she gets out of her self-induced trance.
This may have been a NY Times best seller but I found the whole premise of the story ridiculous and the ending of rebirth made me laugh. Maybe people thought they were buying a Jane Austen type book.
Although unquestionably original, it was pretty uninteresting. And, a story of someone just taking drugs and sleeping was not what I thought the accolades the book received hinted. I did not connect with the writer or with the characters.
I found the main character to be very pathetic.
I absolutely loved writing and the premise of this novel. It’s dark, very dark, but really well done. It makes you look at sleep in a whole new way.
The characters are so real I feel like I know them in life not just on the page
Slow
black humor
Worst book ever! Hundreds of pages of a woman doing drugs and sleeping to avoid life. And then you die. Really, the worst book ever. I want the time I spent reading this back. Should sue the author for wasting my time
The author seemed to bear a grudge against American WASP’s, Jews, and the Chinese. Her view of American culture was negative to the extreme. The treatment of her main character was vicious, sadistic, inhumane, and needless to say, condescending. Other characters did not fare much better. In sum the book was a cleverly contrived display of deep hatred.
Unless you love hating a book’s protagonist, I don’t recommend this. The girl loves to sleep and thinks she’s pretty every time she’s awake. That’s it. She has a friend that’s portrayed as annoying but I didn’t see anything wrong with her. She sounded like a caring friend with her own insecurities. I only gave an extra star instead of the 1 I planned because the ending was better than I expected.