My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Ottessa Moshfegh’s third novel has a premise that sounds like a joke. A young, beautiful, wealthy, Columbia-educated woman living in a Manhattan apartment in the year 2000 decides to hibernate. With the help of a spectacularly irresponsible psychiatrist named Dr. Tuttle, who prescribes an ever-escalating cocktail of sedatives, sleeping pills, and medications whose purposes even she seems unclear about, the unnamed narrator sets out to sleep for an entire year, convinced that if she can just shut down completely, she’ll emerge on the other side somehow renewed.

The novel is told in the narrator’s flat, disaffected voice as she drifts between consciousness and pharmaceutical oblivion. During her waking hours, she watches movies on VHS, orders delivery, deals with her aggressively concerned best friend Reva, and returns to sleep. She has recently lost both parents. She has recently ended a relationship with a man she describes with contempt. She has quit her job at a gallery. She has, by any conventional measure, everything a person could want, and she wants none of it.

The book divided readers sharply and continues to do so. For some, it’s a brilliant, corrosive satire of millennial disaffection and the emptiness at the heart of privilege. For others, it’s a deliberately unpleasant novel about an unlikable character whose suffering is too cushioned by money and beauty to generate real sympathy. Both readings have merit, and where you land depends largely on what you think fiction owes its readers.

Moshfegh’s Ruthless Comedy of Withdrawal

The novel’s strongest quality is its voice. Moshfegh gives her narrator a flat, brutal honesty that produces dark comedy on nearly every page. The narrator’s contempt is democratically distributed: she despises her best friend Reva’s neediness, her ex-boyfriend’s pretensions, her therapist’s incompetence, and her own participation in a world she finds meaningless. But the contempt never feels performative. It reads as genuine exhaustion with a culture that has given her everything except a reason to care.

Dr. Tuttle is the novel’s comic masterpiece. A psychiatrist who treats her patients with combinations of medications that shouldn’t be mixed, who operates from an office that appears to also be her living space, and who seems to be on several of her own prescriptions, she’s rendered with a specificity that makes her both absurd and frighteningly recognizable. Her scenes are the novel’s funniest, and they function as a satire of the American pharmaceutical industry that is all the more effective for being played completely straight.

The pre-9/11 setting is deployed with restraint but unmistakable purpose. The novel takes place in 2000 and 2001, and the narrator’s project of total withdrawal from the world is framed against a moment when the world was about to demand engagement in ways nobody anticipated. Moshfegh doesn’t belabor this irony. She lets it sit in the background, giving the novel a quality of dramatic irony that intensifies on rereading.

Moshfegh also writes physical discomfort with a precision that is itself a kind of dark pleasure. The narrator’s body, deteriorating from months of sedation and poor nutrition, is described with clinical detachment. The apartment accumulates filth. Reva discovers evidence of the narrator’s sleepwalking adventures, which are deeply unsettling. The novel’s willingness to sit with physical grossness is part of its project: this is what withdrawal from the world actually looks like, not romantic solitude but degradation.

The Problem of a Protagonist Who Refuses to Care

The narrator’s lack of engagement is the novel’s central artistic choice, and it’s also the source of its most common criticism. A character who doesn’t want anything, who actively resists the reader’s attempts to understand or sympathize with her, creates a particular kind of reading experience. Some find it thrilling, a refusal of the emotional contracts most novels enforce. Others find it tedious, arguing that a novel about boredom risks becoming boring itself.

The narrator’s privilege insulates her from consequences in ways that limit the novel’s stakes. She can afford her apartment, her medications, and her year of sleep because she has money. Her beauty protects her from social consequences that would attend a less attractive person behaving the same way. Moshfegh is clearly aware of this, the privilege is part of the portrait, but awareness doesn’t eliminate the problem. Readers who struggle to invest in characters whose suffering is voluntarily chosen and financially cushioned will struggle with this book.

Reva, the narrator’s best friend, is simultaneously the most sympathetic and most abused character in the novel. She’s desperately trying to maintain a connection with someone who treats her with open disdain, and her own problems, a failing affair with a married man, grief over her dying mother, are treated by the narrator and perhaps by the novel itself as irritations rather than legitimate pain. Whether this represents a deliberate critique of the narrator’s solipsism or a genuine failure of empathy in the novel itself is one of the book’s most debated questions.

The novel’s structure, essentially a series of episodes punctuated by periods of unconsciousness, can feel repetitive. The cycle of waking, medicating, sleeping, and waking again drives the first half effectively but loses momentum in the middle sections where the variations become smaller and the comedy becomes less surprising.

Sleep as Refusal

The key insight of the novel is that sleep, in this context, isn’t rest. It’s refusal. The narrator is not tired. She is refusing to participate in a world she finds unbearable, using unconsciousness as a form of protest against a life that, by all external measures, is enviable. This makes the novel a pointed commentary on the gap between the lives we’re told we should want and the emptiness those lives can contain. The narrator has beauty, money, education, and freedom, and she experiences them as a weight she can only escape by shutting down entirely. Whether this makes her a tragic figure or a privileged brat is the question the novel poses without answering.

Should You Read My Year of Rest and Relaxation?

This is a book for readers who enjoy dark comedy, unreliable or unsympathetic narrators, and fiction that refuses to be likable. If you’re drawn to writers who prioritize voice and atmosphere over plot, and if you can appreciate a character study of someone deliberately unpleasant, Moshfegh delivers a reading experience unlike almost anything else in contemporary fiction. The pre-9/11 setting adds a layer of meaning that enriches the entire book.

Avoid it if you need to root for your protagonist, if you find novels about wealthy people’s ennui frustrating rather than illuminating, or if repetitive structure bothers you. The narrator is designed to resist your sympathy, and if you’re not on board with that project, the novel offers very little else to hold onto. It’s a book that asks you to spend time with someone most people would leave a room to avoid.

The Verdict on My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Moshfegh wrote a novel about a woman doing nothing and made it compulsively readable. That’s a genuine achievement. The voice is razor-sharp, Dr. Tuttle is an inspired creation, and the pre-9/11 setting gives the narrator’s withdrawal a resonance that transcends personal psychology. The novel’s deliberate unpleasantness and structural repetition will lose some readers, and the questions about whose suffering deserves attention are ones the book raises without fully resolving. But as a portrait of what happens when a person who has everything decides she wants nothing, it’s as funny and as bleak and as unsettling as any novel published in the last decade.