ReReview: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
Overview: The narrator is stuck in a period of stasis. She's suppressing the grief from her parents' close together deaths. She's afforded the luxury of not having to do anything by the inheritance they left behind, so when her job at the art gallery feels like a drag, she puts in little effort until she's fired. Her friend is so embroiled in her own problems that there's no one in the narrator's life to keep her in check, and finding a dubious psychiatrist who's willing to medicate her to near death opens up the possibility to unsubscribe from life for a while through pharmaceuticals that send her into deep sleep. The narrator secretly hopes, though, that by the end of the blackouts she will have found a sense of purpose, an idea of life's meaning in her reset black hole. Overall: 4
ReReview Notes: For the last few months, I've wanted to reread My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I owned a copy of the book, so it would be easy enough, but I also felt like I owed it to the book. After attempting to read Sally Rooney in 2021 as my first steps into literary fiction when I felt I'd grown out of YA, I hated the books. I was a different person then. I've grown; I've evolved. I now count those Rooney books I hardly liked enough to review among the books that most fundamentally altered my life because a year and a half later, I gave them another try. I'd lived a lot of life in the year and a half moving out on my own to Los Angeles and doing a year and a half of college. In the time since I reread the Rooney books, I've changed even more, and (even though My Year of Rest and Relaxation has its own considered and fully adult haters) I felt like I needed to give it another go with adult eyes. Also, in the intervening years, I've realized that Moshfegh has a taste for the grotesque and disquieting that I don't personally share, so after ditching Eileen halfway through and not even wanting to attempt Lapvona, I figured this was my best shot at getting into a Moshfegh. So here's what I gleaned from the experience...
I'll link the old review here for the sake of it, but I hate being reminded that all these eras of myself are compressed into this online archive. I'm not rereading the review until I've finished this one as not to change my current opinions before documenting them.
The 2025 Review: I think I get where Moshfegh was coming from much more this time. I'd lived through periods of isolation as a teenager, but I'd been so deeply online at the time that I don't think I noticed it as much. I picked up this book at this particular moment in my life because I figured I'd find the most in it now. I'm in a privileged position of living with my parents, having my needs covered, waiting for my summer job to pick up again without having to work for these few months; waiting around for summer and then for grad school. I have jokingly called it My Three Months of Rest and Relaxation to friends. But I understand the numbing effect of suddenly not having to do anything, of feeling a bit disaffected and more than a little bored. Of being able to do everything but not really being able to bring yourself to do half of it on the bad days. The narrator is certainly depressed, and that's a state that I am intimately familiar with, especially when I go through periods of having more limited contact with the outside world. While I'd never resort to what the narrator does, I do understand her desire to sleep away her life, or at least this phase of life. To be able to not think. It's clearly a choice driven by grief and heartache and depression and a lack of purpose. She was set up for that by her parents to some degree and by not connecting with the world that she found herself in. Her choices are ridiculous but understandable if you can meet her where she's at.
I actually found the book fairly engrossing. After a pretty awful slump for the first two weeks of February, this was the first novel I'd tried that I found myself actively wanting to read. I found the narrator's voice interesting, and there was far more drive to the plot, to the filling in of backstory and the iterations of her sleep than I recalled. I would imagine this is because I'm now much more attuned to the stripped back plots and interior focus of literary fiction now as opposed to the loud thrum of YA plots, even the character driven ones. I honestly think that most of the negative formal reactions to literary fiction that accidentally obtains mass appeal driven by TikTok or good marketing or whatever makes them break through comes from the pulse of these books being very distinct and very different to YA or genre fiction. It's strange and feels wrong when it's unfamiliar, and your first or fifth likely won't hit the same as books you've read before. I've put in my hours, and I felt like I was rewarded on this reread with the fascinating nuance and the lightness of her voice when treading over extremely heavy topics. Moshfegh uses quite the heavy-handed flourish with these characters, taking them to nearly cartoonish extremes but giving them all roots that keep them tethered to a sympathetic reality. It's a tight novel, and it progresses with intention. The beginning, the recollections of her life before the sleep with her parents and college and work and Reva and the gallery. The constant struggle with Dr. Tuttle to coerce the right prescriptions and keep them coming. There's the break of finally leaving the apartment the first time, Reva's threaded story adding more tension and drama in a subtle way that pulls at the reader, and then the ultimate rehabilitation sleep. There's a surprising amount of plot range in a book that largely takes place on a single block.
Also, reading it now, much more familiar with the lit fic world, I had context for some of the more disturbing passages where Moshfegh lets herself experiment with the grotesque in describing the narrator's dreams, the art exhibits, and other small snippets. This is, however, much more restrained on that front and therefore more accessible than her other novels. But it was funny to note as I read, that authorial hallmark in a somewhat divergent work.
spoiler
I was surprised, mostly, by the ultimate note of hope that Moshfegh ends on. I couldn't remember the ending of the novel, so I kept anticipating an ultimately cynical note, a crash out, or a final scene in the confines of sleep. I didn't expect the narrator to wake up and try, even if only for a few pages. The novel ends on the ultimate tragedy of 9/11 and her witnessing the event on the television, right as she's starting to turn things around and look for meaning in life. Surprisingly, Moshfegh uses this moment not to create a backslide that shows hope is temporary but to bolster the narrator's sense of reverence for being awake, for knowing life is a precious and fleeting commodity. I usually don't care if novels end on a downer note, but I found this simple offering of hope to actually be quite meaningful.
reaction to my old review
You know, I don't hate this one. I think I made some good points and even had a funny line or two. It's honestly far more positive than the impression of the book that lingered in my head afterwards. In contrast to the month and a half it took me to read the book the first time, I read it in four days this time. I get the hype much more now, and while I still empathize with Reva heavily, I think I understand the protagonist much more now, for better or worse. Also, I think it's funny I had a snarky line comparing it to the boring classics you read in school, and this year, I started reading classics for fun. Oh, how we all change. I also thought it was funny how I thought the ending was unfulfilling or unfinished or didn't offer enough commentary on what the point was, which shocks me now. I found it to be, on the present read, a hopeful ending that left our character in as definite of a place as a book like this could give. I also thought that Moshfegh did a good job of adding subtle and appropriate commentary about the joy of figuring out how to view life with fresh eyes. That you can re-find the value of life even after you've lost it. Again, I think I was just used to a much more buttoned up view of literature, but it's funny to read commentary from my old self.
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