Reading Order
My Year of RestMy Year of Rest and Relaxation Reading Order
Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) is a complete standalone novel. There is no sequel. The novel follows an unnamed narrator — thin, beautiful, recently orphaned, working at an art gallery in New York — who decides to spend a year in a chemically induced hibernation, spending her inheritance on a psychiatrist who prescribes her increasingly powerful medications. The novel is set in New York in 2000–2001 and ends just before September 11. It is a darkly comic novel about depression, privilege, nihilism, and the desire to disappear from your own life.
Where to start
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Complete My Year of Rest Book List
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My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Ottessa Moshfegh·2018·Standalone — a beautiful, privileged young woman in New York decides to spend a year in a chemically induced sleep; darkly comic, nihilistic, and set in the year before 9/11 - Buy
Eileen
OptionalOttessa Moshfegh·2015·Moshfegh's Booker-shortlisted debut — a miserable young woman in 1960s Massachusetts working at a juvenile detention center; read for more of Moshfegh's unreliable, self-loathing female narrators - Buy
McGlue
OptionalOttessa Moshfegh·2014·A novella about an alcoholic sailor in 1851 accused of murder who can't remember the crime; Moshfegh's experimental debut work
My Year of Rest — Frequently Asked Questions
Is My Year of Rest and Relaxation a standalone?
Yes — My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a complete standalone novel. Moshfegh has written other novels (Eileen, Death in Her Hands, Lapvona) and story collections (Homesick for Another World), but they are entirely independent.
What happens at the end of My Year of Rest and Relaxation?
The narrator's year of sleeping ends and she wakes, somewhat changed — or perhaps not. The novel ends on a note of ambiguity about whether the hibernation worked, concluding with the narrator watching footage from September 11 and seeing her friend Reva in the crowd. Moshfegh has said the ending is intentionally open about whether the narrator has healed.
Why is My Year of Rest and Relaxation considered a feminist novel?
My Year of Rest and Relaxation has been read as a feminist novel for its interest in the female body as a site of cultural demands — the narrator's body is described in terms of its desirability, her medications are prescribed by a male psychiatrist who treats her casually, and the novel is partly about the pressure on women to be beautiful, productive, and emotionally available. The hibernation can be read as a refusal of all those demands.
Is My Year of Rest and Relaxation funny?
The novel is darkly comic — its humor comes from the narrator's extreme detachment, the absurdity of her psychiatrist's prescriptions, and Moshfegh's deadpan delivery of self-loathing observations. Many readers find it genuinely funny; the comedy is inseparable from the bleakness.
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