The narrator hardly ever does anything unsurprising. The sentences are short, snide, and cutting edge. But surprisingly, the repetitiveness is what I enjoyed most about the book. Tuttle that you have insomnia and take more medication, meet Reva, despise her, take more medication, watch some movies, sleep. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a book that can get repetitive: Sleep, lie to Dr. This might be one of the reasons she chooses to sleep as a form of escape instead of drugs, alcohol, or work.

They would sleep away her school time and wake up many hours later. One thing that is often missed in many book reviews and analysis is that sleeping is one of the things that our unnamed narrator and her mom did together. Her mom is an alcoholic who once fed her own little girl Valium to keep her from crying. In the very beginning of the book, you can understand the pain point of our narrator is her upbringing: Her dad is an indifferent, snide professor who is even apathetic towards his own death. It is a story of escape, of privilege, of confessions that can make your brain turn ice cold. It is certainly not a breezy read or for the faint-hearted.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is filled with sardonic humor, brutal confessions, and vivid descriptions of gross parts of existence. She has taken to movies and drugs after their death – Whoopi Goldberg is her favorite.įor starters, if you dislike literature that has dark humor, icky descriptions of all bits of life that are not glossy, this book is not for you. They have been largely indifferent to her existence and her childhood hasn’t been really happy. Her parents have died recently – dad of cancer and mom of overdose. Ottessa’s heroine also has an on-again-off-again boyfriend Trevor who treats her terribly. Reva is extremely materialistic and jealous of our narrator (“ No fair“, as she would say always when her friend gets something she doesn’t). There is Reva, our narrator’s best (and only) friend. Tuttle who prescribes her all kinds of medications without a check. She has an inheritance that can allow her to sleep for a whole year in an apartment in Manhattan. The story is set in the 2000s, with our narrator being a young, thin, beautiful, Columbia graduate. Alongside ridiculous is an insight into the heart and spirit of a tender, vulnerable, and exhausted woman. The story premise sounds ridiculous: Our unnamed character decides to hibernate for a year to sleep away from her depression and wake up a new person. ‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’ by Ottessa Moshfegh is easily one of the oddest books I have read.

Rest and relaxation book