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.”
Essay Questions & Food for Thought
30questions designed to challenge assumptions and provoke original thinking. These can't be answered from a summary — you need the actual text.
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?
The narrator watches the same VHS movies repeatedly — Whoopi Goldberg vehicles, Harrison Ford thrillers. Why these specific films? What role does media consumption play in the narrator's withdrawal?
Ping Xi photographs and poses the narrator's unconscious body for art installations. Is this exploitation, collaboration, or something more ambiguous? Does the narrator's consent make it ethical?
The narrator describes sex with Trevor in deliberately anti-erotic language. Why does Moshfegh strip physical intimacy of all pleasure and emotion? What is the prose style performing?
Is the novel's 9/11 ending earned? Some critics call it exploitative — using a national tragedy as a narrative device. Others call it the only ending that could break through the narrator's numbness. Where do you stand, and why?
The narrator sees a falling figure she believes is Reva in the final pages. Does it matter whether the figure is actually Reva? What does the narrator's identification tell us about a relationship she spent the entire novel rejecting?
Compare the narrator's blackout self (who shops, gets haircuts, and engages with the world) to her waking self (who wants nothing). Which is more 'real'? What does the split suggest about consciousness and identity?
How does Moshfegh use the art world — the gallery, Natasha, Ping Xi — to comment on the commodification of human experience? Is the narrator herself a kind of art object?
The narrator's mother was a beautiful, narcissistic alcoholic. The narrator is beautiful, narcissistic, and sedating herself with pharmaceuticals. How does Moshfegh use this parallel without letting the narrator acknowledge it?
Compare My Year of Rest and Relaxation to Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. Both feature young women who withdraw from the world. How are the narrators' relationships to their own depression different? How does the half-century between the novels change the terms of the comparison?
The novel is set in 2000-2001 but published in 2018. Why does Moshfegh choose this particular historical moment? What does the seventeen-year gap between setting and publication allow her to do?
The narrator's prose is flat, affectless, and anti-literary. How does this style differ from other depressed narrators (Holden Caulfield, Esther Greenwood, Meursault)? What specific effects does Moshfegh's flatness achieve that theirs do not?
Why does the narrator keep answering Trevor's calls even after their breakup? She claims to feel nothing for him. Is she lying to the reader, to herself, or is the compulsion something other than feeling?
Moshfegh has said she is interested in characters who are 'repulsive yet compelling.' How does the narrator manage to be both? Identify three specific moments where you were simultaneously repelled by and drawn to her.
The narrator's father was gentle and loving; her mother was beautiful and cruel. How do these parental models shape the narrator's relationship to gentleness and beauty in her own life?
How does the novel treat consumerism? The narrator shops during blackouts, watches commercial movies, and lives off inherited wealth. Is she outside the consumer system or its most honest participant?
What is the function of the bodega in the novel? The narrator visits it repeatedly — it is her primary contact with the outside world. Why a bodega and not a restaurant, a park, or a friend's apartment?
The narrator's emergence in the summer of 2001 is presented without epiphany, without a therapeutic breakthrough, without explanation. Why does Moshfegh refuse to explain the recovery? What argument about healing is she making?
Infermiterol is a fictional drug. Why does Moshfegh invent a medication rather than using only real pharmaceuticals? What does the fictional drug allow that real ones do not?
Compare the narrator's relationship to her apartment with Gregor Samsa's room in Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Both characters retreat into sealed domestic spaces. How are the meanings of their enclosures different?
The novel has been called 'the first great novel of millennial burnout.' Do you agree? What specific features of millennial experience does the narrator's withdrawal reflect?
Reva's mother dies of cancer during the novel — the same disease that killed the narrator's father. The narrator never acknowledges this parallel. What is the effect of this unspoken connection?
How does the novel use beauty as a theme? The narrator's beauty is both her most visible privilege and the thing that most thoroughly reduces her to an object. Is Moshfegh sympathetic to the narrator's experience of beauty, or critical of it?
The novel was published in 2018 but is set before smartphones, social media, and the post-9/11 surveillance state. How would the narrator's sleep project be different — or impossible — in the age of Instagram and constant connectivity?
Read the final two pages aloud. How does the rhythm of the prose change — or not change — as the narrator watches the towers fall? What is the effect of maintaining the flat register through a scene of catastrophe?
Albert Camus's The Stranger opens: 'Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.' Compare Meursault's indifference to the narrator's indifference. Are they performing the same alienation, or is the narrator's refusal fundamentally different from Meursault's?