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.”
Short 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.
Detailed Summary
Set in New York City from approximately June 2000 to September 2001, the novel follows an unnamed narrator in her mid-twenties who has recently lost both parents — her father to cancer, her mother to a combination of alcoholism and heartbreak. She graduated from Columbia with an art history degree, ...