My Year of Rest and Relaxation

MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION by Ottessa Moshfegh If I were to describe this in one word it would be: absurd. And it was, but in a good way. On the outside, our unnamed narrator has everything going for her. She’s young, beautiful, thin, a recent Columbia grad working at an art gallery in NY, and to top it all off, independently wealthy (due to the recent deaths of her parents). She has every privilege yet isn’t happy. When you can manipulate your therapist into prescribing you a bajillion different medications just so you can sleep whole days away, you might have a problem. This was a darkly comedic and satirical portrayal of a woman with mental health issues going through grief. She doesn’t have the capacity to deal with her loss so she turns to unhealthy coping mechanisms (prescription drugs). Reading this gave me so much anxiety because if anyone IRL did this, they’d be dead before the year was over! You’ll either love this book or hate it. Me? I kinda loved it. Rating: 4/5 ⭐️

I won't lie the book is easy to put down, but when it gets you it gets you. Sometimes it was hard to resonate with the main character other times it was highly amusing and got many chuckles out of me. Not a book you read in one sitting but something I'm glad I (eventually) finished

Fresh, innovative, brilliant: Moshfegh is the author of the Millennium! The prose is crystalline and precise, and she has a way of presenting characters that is hilariously insightful and dead-on accurate.

Great book but my Book came covered in something sticky on the pages of the beginning of the book.

I ordered and payed for a hardcover and they sent me a paperback. I would like the edition I paid for.

I went into this blind and came out heartbroken. I wanted to like her so bad but she is a broken protagonist. You basically experience a year long binge of various drugs from a self obsessed rich skinny girl in Manhattan. Her friend is the only character that gave me hope. The ending crushed me although I do feel like it was predictable after a certain point. I flipped the last page expecting closure but I think the entire point is that sometimes suffering is pointless. Even when we do it to ourselves.

Took a story with a lot of suffering and made it hilarious. Funny, sarcastic, addicting; I devoured this book.

The book is not for everyone, it is filled with dark humor and the book tends to stay quite stagnant throughout. There is no huge twists or turns, but rather you follow the life of a depressed it girl in NYC as she choses to take a year off to sleep through her whole life with sleeping pills. The small details makes the book ironic and enjoyable.

I purchased this book for my Modern Literature course and I fell in love with it. Moshfegh has a talent for writing awful, weird, gross characters that you love to hate, and sometimes hate to identify with. This novel is a deep look at the consumerism in the 2000s, depression, classism, feminism, and privilege. I think if I had read this outside of my course I would have missed a lot of the deeper meaning and criticism of society in the early 2000s. If I had to compare this book to something else I would consider this the female, 2000s version of American Psycho and in a lot of ways Moshfegh is creating a dialogue to Bret Easton Ellis, without a lot of the subversive misogyny. I would recommend this book to anyone.