My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Ottessa Moshfegh (2018)
“A beautiful, wealthy young woman tries to sleep through an entire year of her life — and the reader can't look away.”
At a Glance
An unnamed narrator — young, beautiful, independently wealthy, and orphaned — decides to hibernate through the year 2000 in her Upper East Side apartment, aided by an incompetent psychiatrist who prescribes an absurd cocktail of sedatives. Her only tether to the waking world is Reva, a codependent best friend the narrator openly despises. As the months blur together in pharmaceutical fog, the narrator's project of self-erasure collides with grief she refuses to name, a culture she refuses to participate in, and a catastrophe she cannot sleep through.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Published in 2018, the novel became an immediate cultural phenomenon — particularly among millennial and Gen Z readers who recognized in its narrator their own exhaustion with performative wellness, productivity culture, and the demand to be constantly present. It arrived at the peak of the 'self-care' discourse and detonated it: the narrator's sleep project is self-care taken to its logical, absurd, devastating conclusion.
Diction Profile
Conversational but deliberately anti-literary — simple vocabulary, short sentences, clinical precision where emotion is expected
Extremely low