Zara

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, is an incredible book that portrays the 

reality of depression and the lengths that one will go through in order to achieve peace. The narrator hatches a plan in order to sleep through an entire year, lying to therapists for sleeping pills, denying her friend’s attempts to get her to go to parties, and eventually locking herself in a room to sleep for months. She thinks that sleeping would get her away from her problems, but  when she awoke from her slumber she had missed out on everything. 

The narrator is unnamed, which seems to be a method the author uses to make her more relatable. Although I find her character irritable at times, she is extremely relatable. She is self-absorbed, avoidant, pessimistic, and neglects her only friend; but despite all that, she’s practical. She says, “Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion,” begging the question: is being pragmatic and hating life better than being ignorant and loving it?

The sleeping pills were a gateway to peace – rather than living in misery, the narrator avoids all being. She tells us, “This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was my dream.” The hatred she holds for life is so unbearable that it gets to the point where the only consolation is nothing at all– nothing to feel, think, or even dream. 

The comic elements in the book only make it more sad. The narrator’s manipulative tactics towards the people around her make the reader intrigued by her character, but also feel bad for the people she affects, making the reader feel guilty for finding the narrator entertaining at all. The vulgar and obscene parts of the story, such as when the narrator leaves her feces on a stuffed dog after being laid off, make the reality of the book seem unreal and unpredictable. The narrator is a flawed and egocentric character, but it’s fascinating how one can see themselves in her.

The relationship between the narrator and her best friend Reva shows how one will take things for granted and not realize what they have until they lose it. Reva is a prominent character throughout the book, constantly trying to persuade the narrator into going out with her: whether it’s partying, or watching a movie. Reva was there most times when she drifted off to sleep. By the end of the novel, when the narrator achieves her goal of a “year of rest and relaxation,” her friend passes away on 9/11. 

The book ends with the narrator saying, “There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.” 

Scarlett

Ottessa Moshfegh’s big break was her book “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” a book about a rich white girl with “problems” she believes she can fix with a year of sleep. As suggested in the title the author self-isolates while her relationship with the outside world fades away to almost nothing but her walks to the deli across the street, her psychiatrist, her friend Reva, and her eventual sleepwalking. 

While this could’ve been a great statement about the struggle and stress of the world we live in, the use of a wealthy white girl makes the story hard to get through since it’s infuriating to see what she does with her privilege and how tormented and hopeless she believes she is. The narrator is clueless to the world surrounding her because of her reluctance to care about anything other than herself.

Her actions also didn’t have reason: sure she got laid off her job, that could make anyone depressed, but planning to take advantage and waste all of her parent’s inheritance in order to relieve herself of the “agonizing and brutal” world outside, is completely narcissistic and makes the character very unlikeable and hateful. 

“Initially, I just wanted some downers to drown out my thoughts and judgements, since the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything. I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me.” The narrator thinks of no one but herself and her own issues. She drowns herself in them making her oblivious to everything and everyone else, and maybe if there was a reason for this she could be let off the hook, but truly all her problems are self-inflicted. 

This book seemed to have no meaning or message for me as a reader, it’s hard to even find it relatable because of who the narrator is: thin, pretty, white, and wealthy. It’s obvious that the author was trying to say something about the effects of depression and how it can bring out the worst in people, but the writing is so plain and hollow. 

The fact that it can be easily read by a middle schooler could be a quirk, but a book about such deep topics shouldn’t be so simplistic. The shallowness of the wording makes the book boring, tedious, and extremely difficult to get through. You would expect to be at least a little sympathetic with a character facing such “troubled” times, but there was truly no point at which this book did that. The climax you are waiting for, a turning point or even some kind of plot twist never comes. The narrator was superficial and the writing as well, there was no “digging deeper” the book offers only the surface-level.