My affair with My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh began when I stumbled into a book shop in the West Village. The hot pink letters and Jacques-Louis David portrait on the cover pulled me like a magnet to the shelf it rested upon. With time to kill, I took My Year of Rest and Relaxation to the back of the shop, curled up in a corner behind a book cart and read 100 pages in one sitting.
The synopsis of My Year of Rest and Relaxation is relevant, to say the least. A Columbia graduate suffering with a crippling existential crisis? A tired soul who longs to turn off their brain and take a year-long nap? It came as no surprise to me that there was only one copy available at Book Culture—and I bought it.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a novel of the modern romantic era; it is bleak, unsettling, riddled with dark humor and surprisingly tender. The experience of reading this book does actually feel like taking a long nap. Ottessa Moshfegh introduces her readers to a place where it is possible to extract the shallow nothings of our daily lives from the spaces we inhabit. Moshfegh answers the question of what such a “life nap” would mean for the individual. In the process of doing so, she guides her readers through an experiment drawn out by cynicism and emotional fatigue. The journey is dreary yet compelling, and it is ultimately moving. Upon completion of the novel, I felt as if Moshfegh had filled an “energy void” in me that I did not know existed. I felt like I fully experienced the narrator’s lethargic quest through its restorative end.
Many readers will not share my enthusiastic welcoming of Moshfegh’s explicit and vulgar kind of satire. The assortment of psychiatric drugs and truly disgusting mental images she presents are off-putting. Furthermore, our nameless narrator is neither a source of relief nor redemption. She is rich, beautiful, holds a degree from Columbia and has inherited an enormous piece of property with which she can do what she pleases. It must be mentioned that she experiences significant trauma during her undergraduate career, which is described in a rather dry but haunting manner. The void she seeks to fill after a turbulent college experience hides underneath layers of staggering privilege. The very idea that she can take an entire year off from her life (and in the process, humiliate her employer) with no material consequences makes it difficult to pity her. Yet her apathy and complete rejection of the social order feel uncomfortably satisfying. My Year of Rest and Relaxation’s narrator is the problematic antihero. What she seeks is the opposite of control. What she imagines lies on the other end of her hibernation project is freedom; an abandonment of her pains and obligations for a version of her life that she can dictate from its very start.
Our narrator’s psychological fatigue is more than familiar. College students and recent graduates spend their days navigating a world in which, for most of us, any sense of control is fleeting. The value of a college degree is seriously under question and still, we invest exorbitant amounts of money and energy into achieving them. The world that awaits us following graduation is expensive and impossible to make sense of. On top of all of that, unpredictable traumas are still an inevitable part of the human experience. Our urgency to be free of our traumas, for the sake of our careers, only blinds us to the reality that we can’t be—and that that might be okay. Our existential anxieties stamp out all the empty spaces in our lives; the spaces in which we would have the means to stop and smell the roses. Sometimes, it feels like the only solution is to just sleep. In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh reminds us that it is reasonable, valid and even healthy to reset our lives’ clocks according to our needs.