My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Literary fiction · Dark comedy · Satire

First published: 2018
Print length: 288 pages2018

Description

Set in New York City around 2000 and 2001, the novel follows an unnamed young woman alienated from her post-college life. After losing both parents, she grows increasingly dissatisfied with her privileged existence on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. When she also loses her gallery job, she devises an extreme attempt to reset her life: spending nearly an entire year asleep. An unconventional psychiatrist supplies a growing regimen of prescription drugs to help her sleep as much as possible. Rather than providing the fresh start she seeks, her escalating medication use leads to dangerous blackouts and deepens her isolation, further complicating her withdrawal from ordinary life.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Direct · Essayistic · Spare · Witty

Pace

Measured

Tone

Dark · Detached · Irreverent · Satirical

Structure

Fragmented · Linear

Focus

Character · Ideas · Voice

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

AddictionClassGriefIsolationMental healthTransformation

About Ottessa Moshfegh

Ottessa Moshfegh is an American novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter whose fiction combines spare, direct prose with dark comedy and psychological claustrophobia. Her work often confines readers within an isolated consciousness: the alienated young woman who attempts to sleep through a year in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the embittered narrator recalling her youth in Eileen, or the widow in Death in Her Hands who constructs a possible murder from almost nothing. Moshfegh uses unreliable perception, mordant wit, and close attention to bodily and social discomfort to examine loneliness, self-deception, and the desire to escape an intolerable life. Her settings range widely, from the nineteenth-century shipboard world of McGlue to contemporary New York and the corrupt medieval fiefdom of Lapvona, but her interest remains fixed on compromised people shaped by appetite, resentment, privilege, and cruelty. Homesick for Another World extends that scrutiny across shorter forms, finding flashes of beauty without softening its characters’ capacity for harm.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Language: English
ISBN: 9780525522119

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