Review: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

Author: Ottessa Moshfegh
Edition: Paperback (288 pages)
Publisher: Vintage (May 2, 2019)
Genre: Contemporary, Literary Fiction

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Synopsis

My review of My Year of Rest and Relaxation

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a wild ride of a story where time is stretchy and reality is always just out of reach. Our protagonist, a privileged, pretty and rich young woman, tries to spend an entire year sleeping in an attempt to solve all her problems. To help that endeavour, she finds a psychiatrist who prescribes her all sorts of drugs without asking too many questions. What follows is the story of a year that feels like a strange fever dream, populated by characters that are both overdrawn caricatures and simultaneously like people you’ve met.

Plot and Pacing

Time is malleable in My Year of Rest and Relaxation. It stretches and warps itself around places and situations, some moments feel like days, weeks go by in the blink of an eye. Some drugs cause the protagonist to lose days at a time and this is where things get wild. With no memory of her actions over the lost days, she tries to piece together what she did, based on shopping receipts and credit card balances. Suddenly she’s on a train, unsure of how she got there, but on her way nonetheless.

This warped sense of time made for one of the strangest reading experiences I have ever had. I’m not sure I can blame it entirely on the book (though it definitely did its part), but reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation made me incredibly tired. Whenever I had to put the book down, it was like surfacing from a dream. My reading experience mimicked the experience the main character was having to a scary degree; no drugs needed. I think this proves how powerful Ottessa Moshfegh is in her writing, creating all the subtleties of a spaced-out sense of time in ways I only consciously noticed when I stopped reading. The writing grabbed me and pulled me under, to join the main character in her trance and I am so happy I let myself be taken to that place.

Characters

The main character, who remains nameless, is an asshole. Everybody is. There isn’t a single nice character in this book, the psychiatrist Dr Tuttle maybe being the closest. The ex-boyfriend is a douchebag. The main character’s best friend Reva is self-obsessed and insecure, their friendship is more toxic than anything else. And yet these people keep clashing. Reva keeps visiting, the ex-boyfriend is a semi-constant appearance in the narrator’s thoughts. This is the catch: we live in the main character’s thoughts, her disdain for the world and people colours her view. Of course, none of the characters seem likeable, they’re not supposed to be. She might be a terrible person, but I grew to like the narrator. Her cynicism and despair over life, love and loss were relatable and yes, I too have met obnoxious people at art galleries, like the one she works at for a brief stint.

By focusing on the singular perspective of the main character, Ottessa Moshfegh draws us into her mind, we can’t help but empathise with what we find. So while the main character might not be a likeable person, she sure is an interesting one whose story took me to unexpected places and will stay with me for quite some time.

This book is for you if…

…you liked the TV show Fleabag or are looking for a truly strange but beautiful reading experience that’s unlike most books! My Year of Rest and Relaxation deals with similar themes as Fleabag, touching on grief, insecurity and sex and I feel like the main character could be friends with Fleabag.

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