Hello my dearest book people!
Another Tuesday means another Mad Cool Book recommendation from your book-obsessed friend! This week I'm gushing about an explosive literary hit My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. In this book, the main character decides to sleep for a year in order to cure her lingering disinterest in the world and misanthropy. It will blow you mind!!
Ottessa Moshfegh: My Year of Rest and Relaxation
290 pages/7 hrs and 14 mins of audiobook time
Keywords: pills, misanthropy, insane psychiatrist
Snapshot: To reinvent herself a young woman decides to take a year-long nap, enlisting the help of an in-fucking-sane psychiatrist.
Why I think you need this book: At a maximum volume, this provocative book provides a peek into a Manhattan life which is devoid of any substance.
Non-Spoiler Book Talk
The unnamed main character of My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a 24-year-old woman who decides to take a year off from life and spend it sleeping. The idea is that at the end of it she will emerge reinvented, a new person capable of interest in life and people.
Our main character has everything. She is drop-dead gorgeous, comes from money, has a degree in art history from Columbia, and lives in a pretty apartment on the Upper East Side. Yet there is very little that makes her interested in being awake besides Whoopi Goldberg's movies she likes to watch on her VHS (The book is set in 2000). The main character's life is full of terribly superficial relationships with terrible people, and if we're being honest she is pretty terrible herself.
The main character's now deceased parents were terrible--cold, distant, and alcoholic; her best friend, a bulimic social climber is sooo terrible; her on-and-off Wall Street banker boyfriend will make you scream how terrible he is, and her former boss, a Chelsea gallery owner, shows truly terrible art. But by far the worst is the main character's psychiatrist who readily prescribes her insane amounts of sleeping pills in combinations that are least likely to trigger the attention of insurance companies.
Soon, the main character dives into a pill-induced sleep. We follow her sparse waking hours which are filled with bodega trips for coffee, hours in front of TV, and vapid conversations with her best friend. But as she starts to mix her pills like a crazy DJ, adding ever harder drugs to the mix, she starts to live an alternative life while asleep. When she wakes up, she has no recollection of buying a fur coat that hangs in her closet, getting depilated, or attending an art party, the polaroids of which surround her. In her sleep, she's even capable of showing compassion to her best friend whose mother is dying of cancer. The main character starts to live a life, she perhaps wishes she could live awake.
Despite all this terribleness, this book is excellent! The main character is fascinating, and her descend into a pill-induced year-long sleep is nothing like I've read about before.
Totally outlandish, weird, and out-loud bold, this novel will keep you turning the pages until the very end (which BTW is totally worth it). My prediction is you will read it in one sitting.
Cool fact about Ottessa Moshfegh
My Year of Rest and Relaxation isn't the first Moshfegh's novel to feature an unlikeable female character. In her debut novel Eileen, the main character is an unloved 24-year-old who smells and works in a boys' correctional facility. In an interview, Moshfegh called out the sexism of the debate over the likability of female characters and said she despised how much people dwell on the fact that her female characters are not nice or nurturing, but you know, human.