What’s a woman to do when she finds herself beautiful but alone in her 20s? She’s lost her parents, she’s broken up with her boyfriend, and she’s been let go from her job at an art gallery. She has a nice apartment that is paid for by the rent on the house she was left by her parents. She’s not very happy with anything in her life, so she decides to take a year to sleep to reset her life.
It’s not easy to sleep for an entire year, so she finds a sketchy psychiatrist that she can manipulate into giving her a treasure trove of prescriptions, and with careful experimentation, she figures out just how and what to take to take her to a dreamless place of rest. It is the year 2000, so that sort of thing isn’t too difficult.
But as the year goes by, her waking hours are a blur of 1980s VHS movies with Whoopi Goldberg and Harrison Ford and trips to the local bodega for coffee and snacks and her sleeping hours are filled with restless dreams and uncertainty. She gets occasional visits from her high school friend Reva, and she thinks about her parents, her former job, her ex-boyfriend, but she tries to keep her interaction with reality to a minimum.
As she pulls back further into herself, as she leaves more and more of her past behind, can she finally leave all the pain and disappointment of her previous life behind, or will she just drift away into a sense of soul-crushing isolation?
The latest novel from Ottessa Moshfegh is a wild ride of narcotics and ennui. The main character, who is never named, is not very likable, making this a tough book to get through. I tried to read it and filed until I discovered that one of my favorite audio book narrators, Julia Whelan, reads it. That didn’t fix everything that’s difficult about My Year of Rest and Relaxation, but it helped.
I wanted to read this book because I loved her novel Eileen so incredibly much. Wickedly dark and bitingly funny, Eileen left me wanting so much more from Moshfegh. Now, I’m not so sure. My Year of Rest and Relaxation definitely has some of that same darkness, but the humor is far more subtle, still morbid and subversive but somehow it felt like it was turned against me instead of a joke I got to share in.
Would I recommend it to other readers? Sure. It’s still a good book. But it’s not for everyone. You have to really want to get through this one. But if you’re okay with that, if you want to take the time to explore your sadness, your losses, your shortcomings, then dive in. But don’t expect to surface as quite the same person you were going in.
Galleys for My Year of Rest and Relaxation were provided by Penguin Press through Edelweiss, with many thanks, but I purchased the audio book on my own, thanks to Audible.