My Year of Rest and Relaxation

My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) is a novel by Ottessa Moshfegh. Moshfegh’s critically acclaimed debut novel, Eileen, was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and was the recipient of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Moshfegh rose to literary stardom with her sophomore novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which, like her debut novel, follows the life of a competent but deeply unhappy woman in her mid-twenties and desperate to find a way out of her misery. Known for her candid and often blackly funny meditations on human life, Moshfegh returns to themes of loneliness, trauma, transformation, death, and coming of age throughout her literary repertoire. Be advised that the novel includes descriptions of substance use, suicide, eating disorders, and sexually abusive behavior.

This study guide cites the 2019 Penguin Books paperback edition of the text.

Plot Summary

In June 2000, the novel’s unnamed narrator is working as an assistant at an upscale gallery in Manhattan. With an art history degree from Columbia and a sizable inheritance from her deceased parents, the narrator lives a life of ultimate privilege—she is young, beautiful, wealthy, and plainly intelligent. Despite her many advantages, she is deeply unhappy in her life and, at 26, utterly ambitionless; cynical and misanthropic to her core, she has no desire to live.

Desperate to escape the misery of her daily life, the narrator begins a new personal project: to sleep as much as humanly possible over the next 12 months. She claims her motives are not suicidal—she simply prefers unconsciousness to consciousness. There is nothing she truly enjoys in life, and existence is a burden. Moreover, the narrator embarks on this project as a kind of hibernation—her “year of rest and relaxation”—under the assumption that she will emerge from her period of rest as a new and improved person.

Her plan is calculated. To secure deep and relatively unremitting sleep, the narrator has prescription drugs at her disposal. Back in January, when the project’s inspiration had only begun to stir, she saw a psychiatrist, an eccentric and medically unscrupulous woman named Dr. Tuttle who prescribed her an impressive collection of drugs—anticonvulsants, antipsychotics, benzodiazepines, hypnotics, and more—each with some soporific effect. The narrator spent months lying to Dr. Tuttle, fabricating tales of insomnia and wild dreams, when, in reality, she was already sleeping upward of 12 hours a day and hoped the pills would enable her to sleep even more.

Though she first procured her pharmaceutical arsenal in January, the hibernation project officially begins in mid-June when the narrator is fired from her job, where she routinely naps in the supply closet during her lunch hours. Throughout the first half of her hibernation, the narrator is frequently visited by Reva, her best friend from college whom she finds thoroughly irritating. Unlike the narrator, Reva does not have old-money privilege, and she desperately tries to fit in with the upper-class environment of corporate Manhattan. Reva is deeply concerned about social status and demonstrates an extreme concern for her physical appearance that manifests in disordered eating and a penchant for purchasing knock-off designer products. She is concerned about the narrator’s drug-induced somnolence and often expresses love for her.

During the narrator’s waking hours (what few there are), she pursues other methods of emotional avoidance, such as movie-watching. The narrator watches the movies for hours on end, welcoming the escape from the constant barrage of worries and regrets. In those unwelcome moments when she finds herself reflecting on her past, she thinks of her parents, who both died when she was a junior in college, and how they never truly loved her. She also considers her toxic on-again-off-again relationship with her first and only boyfriend, Trevor, who, like her parents, is distant and unfriendly during their time together. Whenever the narrator allows herself to look back on her life, she only feels a compulsion to take more pills and escape through sleep.

One sleeping drug, the fictional Infermiterol, is especially potent and causes the narrator to black out for days at a time. Moreover, the drug has serious psychotropic side effects; she awakens from these blackouts to find that she has behaved uncharacteristically—i.e., gone out clubbing or purchased expensive lingerie.

About halfway through her year of hibernation, the narrator experiences a period in which she struggles to sleep. Her frustration about this situation comes to a head when Reva, concerned for her friend’s wellbeing, steals her pill stash. Hunting for the stash at Reva’s apartment, the narrator accidentally gets locked in the bathroom—but this inspires a new plan: The narrator will lock herself in her apartment for the next six months, sleeping only with the help of Infermiterol, and emerge from her hibernation on June 1, 2001, as a new woman.

To see this plan through, the narrator enlists an artist she knew from her gallery job, Ping Xi. She instructs him to keep her locked inside the apartment and keep her supplied with food and other necessities for when she resurfaces from her blackout every three days. In exchange for his services, Ping Xi is free to document the hibernation for an art project.

When her year of rest and relaxation is over, the narrator is pleased to find that her sleep program had the desired effect. She likens herself to a newborn animal, exploring the world with hope and childlike wonder, ready to move on from her traumatic past. Her cynicism and misanthropy seem to be melting.

At the end of the novel, the 9/11 terrorist attack takes place. That morning, the narrator purchases a new VCR to record the news footage on TV. In one clip, she sees a woman she believes to be Reva jumping from the North Tower of the World Trade Center, where she worked. The narrator watches the footage even long after the tragedy, struck by Reva’s beauty and bravery.