September Book Review: My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.”

An unnamed woman lives in New York City in the early 2000s. She is conventionally beautiful, wealthy enough not to work, and recently orphaned. She has everything she’s supposed to want, but wants none of it. Instead, she commits to a year of doing as little as possible. She isolates herself in her apartment, abuses prescription drugs, and fades into near-total hibernation. One year, she believes, will be enough to renew every cell in her body.

This premise frames Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a novel that operates almost entirely in stasis. At first, the narrator seems like someone from Gossip Girl, part of the city’s glossy elite. But the novel quickly strips that away. This isn’t a glamorous collapse; it’s mind-numbing. The novel reads like the internal monologue of someone hovering just above rock bottom. I was struck by the dissonance between the narrator’s external privilege and her internal emptiness. Moshfegh's prose is sharp and deliberate, creating a cold but compelling tone. I think this is what I liked most about the book; the glossy yet grotesque imagery within her writing.

I began the book with little prior knowledge, only aware that it had stirred strong opinions. I can see why. Moshfegh discards conventional storytelling: no clear arc, no redemption and no likeable protagonist. The narrator wants to sleep, literally and entirely. If you tried to map this on a typical story structure, you'd find very little to hold onto. But that absence seems in line with the novel’s satirical detachment. Despite its stillness, the book is strangely exhilarating. It denies the reader what they expect, namely growth, justification and emotional payoff. Watching a woman reject the demands of productivity, socialisation, even basic self-preservation, is both unsettling and oddly satisfying. Who hasn’t longed, at some point, to simply opt out?

Still, the lack of momentum becomes frustrating. About halfway through, the novel begins to feel as stalled as its narrator’s life. Her treatment of Reva, her only consistent visitor, is cruel and repetitive. Her drug use escalates, her sleep deepens, but little changes. Even the completely insane drug concoctions result in very little consequence. The book gestures toward emotional depth, grief for her parents, disgust for her ex-lover, longing for maternal care, but these threads are rarely developed. They appear and vanish with little consequence. That being said, the imagery surrounding her mother's coldness aligned with the protagonist's expression of grief. I think this invocation of sympathy was vital in the story. Other than that, a lot of my emotions while reading the second half could only be described as exasperating and grey. The book cleverly reflects how depression flattens experience, but it doesn’t always make for compelling reading. The narrator’s coldness can feel less like characterisation and more like avoidance. There’s no sense of movement, no accumulation of meaning. Even her longest hibernation, waking every three days to eat, lands without impact. Her numbness becomes ours.

The relationship with Reva offers one of the novel’s more interesting dynamics: two forms of sadness that reflect each other. Reva performs optimism through dieting, dating and self-help, while the narrator retreats entirely. Neither is coping well. Together, they show how unhappiness manifests in contradiction.

Time is another central force in the book. It blurs and distorts. Weeks pass in sentences; months collapse into fragments. The narrator drifts through time without markers, and the novel follows suit. Grief makes time strange, and Moshfegh captures that with unsettling precision. This was another element I appreciated, especially in the beginning.

Then the ending arrives. Without spoiling specifics, the final pages invoke 9/11 in a way that reframes everything that came before. The narrator is awake, alert, watching something terrible. She feels something. Maybe. The ambiguity is deliberate, and powerful, but also jarring. After so much emotional distance, the shift lands more as shock than resolution. But is it shocking, when two characters close to the protagonist work in the towers and the year is not a secret? The novel’s refusal to explain or justify itself is admirable, but also limiting. It captures the texture of depression but offers little insight into it. The narrator is not just unlikeable; she’s unknowable. We see her actions but not the depths beneath them. That might be the point. But it left me wondering whether the book was withholding meaning or simply lacking it.

In the end, My Year of Rest and Relaxation is more about atmosphere than narrative. It evokes a particular psychological state with eerie fidelity, but doesn’t always offer enough in return. It’s a bold novel, but also a limited one. I admired it. I was often bored. I didn’t connect with it emotionally, but I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Obviously, that is a contradictory review yet it is where I have landed. I think that the predominant issue for some readers, like myself, is that the book seemed to have true potential of depth and change but just did not quite follow through.

One last thing I did love was the character's adoration of Whoopi Goldberg. Mostly because it just made me laugh. I also think it was one clear insight into what the protagonist really admired, maybe even strived for. Moshfegh herself said in an Entertainment Weekly article: "There’s something so authentic about [Goldberg’s] presence onscreen that when I’m watching her I feel like I’m seeing Whoopi Goldberg, the real person, on set,” she explained. “It’s like she’s looking through the camera directly at me and winking to say, ‘we all know this isn’t real.'”

Some favourite quotes:

“I stayed home for a week after my father’s funeral. … I wanted a mother. I could admit that. I wanted her to hold me while I cried … bring me cups of warm milk and honey … give me comfy slippers … Of course I didn’t tell her that this was what I wanted. She was usually passed out in her bed with the door locked.”

“The art world had turned out to be like the stock market… Speculation and opinions drove not only the market but the products.”

"Whoopi Goldberg was one reason to stay alive at least."

3/5 stars