Reviewed by Irene Tsen, a writer.

The drugs are endless, and so is the sleep. So Ottessa Moshfegh’s unnamed protagonist in My Year of Rest and Relaxation spends her year in hopes of being reborn when she wakes up. 

The novel’s protagonist seems to have it all: she’s a rich, white, young, pretty Columbia graduate working in a hip art gallery. Yet there’s something missing, and she chases it in a year-long hibernation, broken only by movies, coffee runs, and Infermiterol blank-outs. She downs pill after pill—Neuroproxin, Maxiphenphen, Valdignore, Silencior, Seconols, Nembutals, Xanax, lithium—mostly to send her to sleep, sometimes to banish her sadness or loneliness. Though she retains some semblance of normality at the start of her year of rest and relaxation, by the end, she is locked in a cage of her own making—literally and figuratively. 

True to Moshfegh’s style, the narrator, as well as other characters in the book, is unlikable. The narrator celebrates her privilege and wealth and hates life. Her interactions with her best friend, Reva, are shallow at best, toxic at worst. “Don’t be a spaz,” she tells Reva when her mother’s cancer spreads to her brain. Trevor, the narrator’s sometimes-boyfriend, uses her to gain back “all the bravado he’d lost in his last affair,” and she respects him while hating him for his manipulation. The narrator’s enabling psychiatrist Dr. Tuttle is more concerned with doling out new drugs than anything else, and doesn’t bat an eye when the narrator lies that she killed her mom. Relationships, providing a touch of dark humor to the story, are an unwanted burden. Concerned only with their own worlds and what others can add to them, the characters’ magnified faults and brutally honest thoughts paint an ugly caricature of self-centeredness. 

The pacing is slow and the plot sometimes monotonous: movie, pills, sleep, repeat. Yet the flashbacks and events separating this muddle reveal a harsh look at the reality of depression, as the narrator finds sleep as the ultimate solution that will “save her life.” These observations, presented in sometimes acerbic, sometimes tragic comments by the narrator, are what make the novel worth reading. Moshfegh’s prose is sharp and unapologetic, the force that propels the story forward when the narrator’s existence is stagnant. 

Reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation is not a pleasant experience. There is no romantic adventure and only the barest hint at a happily-ever-after. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is centered around a bleak longing to escape real life into a different person. By exploring the socially stigmatized idea of “wasting” time resting, it confronts hustle culture and internalized conceptions of our worth being based on our productivity (in fact, in the narrator’s view, “[s]leep felt productive”). And it does so in a disturbing, gripping way that blurs the line between sleeping and living. It doesn’t just describe the narrator’s depression—it invites us to wallow in it.