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.”
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My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Ottessa Moshfegh (2018) · 289pages · Contemporary · 2 AP appearances
Summary
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.
Why It 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...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: Conversational but deliberately anti-literary — simple vocabulary, short sentences, clinical precision where emotion is expected
Narrator: The unnamed narrator: first-person, present-tense in affect even when past-tense in grammar. She tells us what happen...
Figurative Language: Extremely low
Historical Context
2000-2001 New York — late Clinton era, dot-com peak, pre-9/11 complacency: The novel is set in the last year of American complacency — the final months when it was possible to opt out of history because history seemed to have ended. The narrator's ability to sleep through...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Why does Moshfegh leave the narrator unnamed? What does namelessness do to the reader's relationship with a first-person narrator, and how does it connect to the narrator's project of self-erasure?
- The narrator has every advantage: beauty, wealth, education, youth. Why does Moshfegh make her protagonist so privileged? Would the novel work if the narrator were poor?
- Dr. Tuttle is both a comic figure and a critique of American psychiatry. Where does the comedy end and the indictment begin? Can a character be both funny and dangerous?
- Reva is designed to be annoying. Why does Moshfegh make the novel's most emotionally available character also its most irritating? What does this choice say about how we value emotional labor?
- Compare the narrator's sleep project to contemporary 'self-care' culture. Is the narrator practicing self-care or self-destruction? Is there a meaningful difference?
Notable Quotes
“I just wanted to find a way to get through the days without being affected by anything.”
“Sleep felt productive. Something was getting done.”
“Dr. Tuttle just kept writing prescriptions.”
Why Read This
Because this novel does something rare: it makes you care about a character who does not care about anything, including you. The narrator is not likable, not redeemable, and not trying to be — and yet you cannot stop reading. Understanding why is ...