Review: My Year Of Rest And Relaxation

Ottessa Moshfegh’s Substack accomplished what author newsletters rarely do -sit compelled me to read her novel. One taste of her bold, acerbic prose, and I needed to experience a full-length work. She did not disappoint.

Moshfegh’s novel is a triumph of precision: scalpel-sharp prose, deliciously dark humor, and a disorienting spiral into oblivion. The plot centers on an unnamed protagonist determined to erase herself through pharmaceutical hibernation. She believes that a year of chemically induced sleep will cleanse her of pain, history, and identity, allowing her to emerge renewed.

For a novel where “nothing happens,” it teems with death, three deceased parents haunt its pages, and unfolds in one of the world’s most relentlessly alive cities: New York. This tension makes the book compulsively readable.

Three figures orbit her descent: Dr. Tuttle, a glorified drug dealer masquerading as a therapist; Reva, the eternally familiar ‘type of girl’, that friend we all know who highlights self-help books, posts inspirational quotes, and believes fervently that the right diet, job promotion, or relationship will finally fix everything; and Ping Xi, a self-serving artist whose relationship with the protagonist is an exercise in detachment and exhibition. Though absurd, even grotesque, these characters are unnervingly real, their interactions exposing the raw nature of human connection as collisions of need and neglect.

The protagonist and Reva maintain an unspoken pact of enablement: the narrator ignores Reva’s bulimia, while Reva, despite one half-hearted intervention attempt, largely allows the protagonist’s pharmaceutical self-destruction to continue. “My blind eye was the one real comfort I felt I could give her.” Their relationship functions as both lifeline and slow-motion tragedy.

What captivates most is Moshfegh’s rendering of existence at its most raw and abject. The mundane, the grotesque, the painfully human, all distilled into prose both repellent and magnetic. The protagonist’s broken relationship with her parents, particularly the emotional emptiness inherited from her mother, seems central to her experiment. She becomes her mother—cold, withholding, emotionally unreachable, in order to shed this inheritance.

Even in self-imposed hibernation, the protagonist paradoxically continues living. She sleepwalks, sleep-talks, sleep-shops. She emerges, fugue-like, for deliveries, manicures, midnight bodega runs. The body, stubborn thing, refuses erasure.

Most shocking is that the protagonist’s method works. Her hypothesis that “Even a shade of curiosity could sabotage my mission to clear my mind, purge my associations, refresh and renew the cells in my brain” proves true. Conventional wisdom, affirmations, self-improvement, waiting for change fails where a coma-inducing year of sleep succeeds. In her radical passivity, she changes. The world doesn’t.

Perhaps the novel’s most disturbing provocation lies in its ultimate irony: the protagonist who rejects society, normalcy, and conventional wisdom emerges brighter and seemingly happier, while Reva, dedicated follower of self-help mantras, career ambition, and social conformity—is drawn inexorably toward the novel’s looming historical tragedy. What are we to make of this brutal juxtaposition? Moshfegh seems to be asking: which is the true self-destruction? The pharmaceutical hibernation that leads to rebirth, or the grinding participation in a doomed culture?

The novel’s early-2000s setting makes its premise eerily plausible. The specter of 9/11 looms, the dot-com bubble is poised to burst, and the world teeters on the precipice of an increasingly strange era. Reading this today, I wonder how such an experiment might unfold now, when disappearing has become nearly impossible amidst algorithmic addiction and social media feedback loops.

Regrettably, I find myself resonating with the protagonist’s exhaustion and disillusionment, sentiments all too familiar in our age of cultural malaise. The ending disappointed me, but perhaps that’s the point. The protagonist undergoes an internal metamorphosis while the world remains stubbornly unchanged, tilting further into madness. And isn’t that the cruelest joke of all?