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— Summary & Analysis
by Ottessa Moshfegh · published 2018 · 289 pages · Contemporary
A user-friendly study guide for My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (2018): a high-level plot summary, full chapter-by-chapter analysis, theme breakdowns, character profiles, and 30 essay questions designed for ap-english, college readers. Unlike a stock summary, sumsumsum.com adds a diction analysis drawn from Ottessa Moshfegh’s actual text, the 2 documented AP Literature exam appearances of this book, and reading-difficulty guidance (Easy, 3/10) so students, teachers, and lifelong readers know what they are walking into.
“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, ...
Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis
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Start with The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath — The canonical novel of female withdrawal — Esther Greenwood's descent mirrors the narrator's, but Plath's narrator wants to feel and can't, while Moshfegh's can and won't. Then try The Stranger by Albert Camus — Meursault's affectless narration is the literary ancestor of Moshfegh's flat prose — both novels use emotional blankness as a philosophical position. Or pivot to Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis — Same privileged numbness, same affectless register, same refusal to moralize — Ellis's 1985 Los Angeles is the direct precursor to Moshfegh's 2001 Manhattan.