Book Review: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

Book: 103/150

Rating: 4/5

Summary: Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be

Thoughts: A questionably timely read given the isolation we're all experiencing within the global pandemic. This was such a strange book, but I loved it.

No doubt our narrator is beyond privileged to make the decision to hibernate with the help of the world's worst psychiatrist to prescribe her a ridiculous amount of drugs to help her get her sleep on for a year. It honestly felt like it could be a plot point in Girls.

What did I love about this one? I really don't know how to put it into words. The writing was fantastic and the characters were likeable but hateable. This book is definitely not plot driven: I wasn't reading because I was I was intrigued by the end but rather because I just couldn't stop reading. It was addicting. It's one of those books where you curl up on the couch with a glass of wine at like 7pm and stay up late and read it all in one sitting. After finishing this one I immediately requested all of Moshfegh's other books from the library.

If you're looking for a book that's character driven with flawed female characters, this one is for you.