I typically spend what little time I have on the bus to and from campus reading a book. A little while back, I saw My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh getting rave reviews from people online, so I decided I’d give it a try as well. Like most books I read, I went into it completely blind as to what I was getting myself into. After painstakingly finishing all 289 pages, I can now, with my fullest of heart, recommend everyone to never read this book. My only expectation of this book was for it to be decent, and apparently, even that was too high a bar to set.
*spoiler warning*
The book, My Year of Rest and Relaxation centers around our unnamed narrator. A twenty-something-year-old, conventionally attractive WASP, who lives in a luxury apartment on the Upper East Side of New York. After the recent death of her father, and quickly after the suicide of her mother, our narrator sets her course for the next year to live in a pill-induced comatose state. She is going to sleep for the next year in an attempt to “rebirth” herself to find a new lease on life.
The book follows her first-person narrative through the year 2000 into 2001, and focuses on her relationships with her parents, her abusive off-and-on-again lover Trevor, her bulimic best friend Reva, her problematic physiatrist Dr.Tuttle and the star “artist” Ping Xi.
She is deep in the trenches of depression and grief, with her only self-proclaimed solution being to sleep the year away. Her story is heavy, and she is handling it awfully. The book glorifies excessive drug use as a coping mechanism, abusive relationships, bulimia, and overall being a shitty person. Our narrators blasé “my life sucks” attitude and over use of sarcasm, makes her an insufferable narrator to follow. The book is about her privilege, depression and her overall displeasure with her life coated in satire and derogatory humour. This humour is typically directed at herself, her alleged best-friend Reva (as a projection of her self-hatred), any minority group you can think of, or simultaneously all three.
I took pleasure in her self-destruction. I finally started to slightly enjoy the book halfway through when she went into “blackout” periods after taking a cocktail of mixed pills and a swig of tap water. One of the times, she eventually found herself three days later in completely different clothes and glitter in her mouth. I think I got so excited because some plot was finally happening. Stakes were being introduced. She yearns for sleep, but she now lacks control. Then, she stopped taking the drug that made her blackout and it was back to bitching about the same things from before over and over. Think “My life sucks. The world sucks. Everything sucks. And I like to make satirical jokes about it that suck.” It’s personified juvenile angst in a book. Her inner monologue reads like a rebellious rich teenage girl who had and has anything she could ever want, and is somehow troubled by that.
Now, I don’t think Moshfegh is a bad writer. I’m assuming she wrote it intending to mirror what our narrator is feeling. Slow, bleak, but with spurts of quick and fast-paced plot to give the feeling of drugs that she was taking. Cuts in time when she blacks out, and vivid flashbacks to her life with her parents. I will admit, her writing when talking about the narrator’s parents is one of the only parts I enjoyed (besides the post-blackout spurts). It felt very sad and real, and a part of me felt sympathetic towards her. Although she and her parents had a tumultuous relationship, you can tell she still deeply cared for them and even looked up to her dad in some ways, despite all his flaws. Then, it would shift back to the current reality, and I would groan at the number of times I could count the word “whatever” on the next page. I counted 198 times total. Meaning that two-thirds of the pages in this book have the word “whatever” on them.
The book is overly descriptive, and I would dread her leaving her apartment because I knew I would have to read over two pages about how the street looked or a bathroom or whatever she was looking at and observing. I will say, while having an awful narrator, a bleak and dull “plot”(if you could even call it that), the one thing this book does well, is it puts you into her f*cked up annoying little brain, and makes you want to rip it in half.
The book ends with our narrator waking from her self-induced 4 month off-and-on coma, with the aid of Ping Xi. Awoken, she has a new desire to live and is presumably “cured” of all her mental hardships. She leaves her apartment, starts to enjoy the days, simply sitting in the park reading or watching and listening to the world around her.
Cut to the very last page of the book *major spoilers ahead* and our narrator is living through the 9/11 terrorist attack and is urgently buying a TV/VCR so she can record the planes crashing into the towers. I wish I was joking. You knew this is where the book was heading from the third page: “I watched summer die and autumn turn cold and gray through a broken slat in the blinds”. The book starts at the beginning of Autumn 2000 it will end in Autumn 2001. It alludes to the attacks for the rest of the book with Reva being transferred to the twin towers and mentions of the towers multiple other times throughout the book. The last sentence of the book is describing the utter beauty of the woman leaping to her death off the 78th floor that she believes to be Reva, her now former friend, “…because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.”
Now, I am not one to typically put down a book, roll over and come to the conclusion that “I just don’t get it.” I perfectly understand what this book is trying to do, and it didn’t do it well. The writing is good in some parts, mediocre at most and overall not very gripping or interesting. It tries to be something deep, but fails. It’s a story of nothing, trying to be about something so much bigger than itself. An attempt at a commentary on life, but it falls flat. Maybe in some f*cked up way, I enjoyed this book. But then I open it, read a sentence and feel my blood start to boil, and put it back down.
I can’t say for certain if I hate it or am just thankful I finished reading this book, but what I can say is that you should never ever read this book.