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.”
My Year of Rest and Relaxation— Historical Context & Author Background
Author: Ottessa Moshfegh · Published 2018· Era: Contemporary·289 pages
Themes explored: depression, privilege, numbness, beauty, grief, consumerism, sleep-as-escape, pre-9/11
About Ottessa Moshfegh
Ottessa Moshfegh (b. 1981) is an Iranian-Croatian American writer who grew up in the Boston suburbs, studied at Barnard College and Brown University's MFA program. Before My Year of Rest and Relaxation, she published Eileen (2015), a thriller about a deeply unpleasant young woman — establishing her signature: narrators who are compelling because of, not despite, their repulsiveness. Moshfegh has spoken openly about her own experiences with depression and her interest in characters who exist at the margins of social acceptability. She has described her writing process as channeling voices that fascinate and disturb her, and she has consistently refused to make her female narrators likable in the way contemporary publishing often demands.
Life → Text Connections
How Ottessa Moshfegh's real experiences shaped specific elements of My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
Moshfegh studied art at the Rhode Island School of Design before turning to writing, and holds an MFA from Brown
The narrator's art history degree from Columbia and her immersion in the Chelsea gallery world
Moshfegh writes the art world from inside knowledge. The satire of galleries, conceptual art, and art-world pretension has the specificity of lived experience.
Moshfegh has discussed her own battles with depression and disillusionment with conventional success
The narrator's complete withdrawal from professional and social life despite possessing every advantage
The novel's depiction of depression is not clinical but phenomenological — it describes what withdrawal feels like from the inside, not how it looks from outside.
Moshfegh was born in 1981 and was twenty during the events of the novel — the same age as the narrator
The novel's millennial-era New York setting, its VHS culture, its pre-digital sensibility
Moshfegh is writing from memory as much as imagination. The Y2K-era details are not research but recollection.
Moshfegh has consistently refused to write 'likable' female characters, pushing back against industry pressure
A narrator who is cruel, entitled, self-absorbed, and impossible to stop reading
The novel's power depends on its refusal to make the narrator sympathetic. Moshfegh treats likability as a form of dishonesty.
Historical Era
2000-2001 New York — late Clinton era, dot-com peak, pre-9/11 complacency
How the Era Shapes the Book
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 a year is itself a product of the era: the inherited wealth, the pharmaceutical access, the cultural infrastructure of upper-class Manhattan that insulates its residents from consequence. September 11 does not merely end the novel; it ends the conditions that made the novel's premise possible. You cannot sleep through the 21st century the way you could sleep through the end of the 20th.
Why My Year of Rest and Relaxation Matters Historically
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.
- One of the first post-2008 novels to treat female passivity and withdrawal as philosophically serious rather than pathological
- Pioneered a new model of the 'unlikable female narrator' — not merely flawed but actively repellent, yet irresistibly readable
- One of the first literary novels to use 9/11 not as subject but as structural device — the event that ruptures the narrative rather than driving it
Not widely banned, but frequently challenged in university settings for its unflinching depictions of drug use, its protagonist's casual cruelty, and its refusal to moralize about either. Some critics have objected to the 9/11 ending as exploitative — a debate Moshfegh has declined to engage with.