Reading Order
My Year of Rest and Relaxation Reading Order
Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) is the New York satirical novel about a beautiful, wealthy, recently orphaned young woman in Manhattan in 2000–2001 who decides to sleep for a year — medicating herself into unconsciousness with the help of a reckless psychiatrist — in order to emerge, she believes, as a new person. Narrated in a voice of detached, affectless self-awareness that is both funny and deeply unsettling, the novel is a dark comedy about privilege, depression, and the American obsession with self-improvement that found a vast readership and became one of the defining literary novels of the late 2010s.
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My Year of Rest and Relaxation
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My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Ottessa Moshfegh·2018·Stand-alone — no prior Moshfegh required, though Eileen (2015) is her debut and introduces her characteristic voice and dark sensibility.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation — Frequently Asked Questions
What is My Year of Rest and Relaxation about?
My Year of Rest and Relaxation follows a nameless narrator — a beautiful, thin, blond Columbia graduate with a job at a Manhattan art gallery and wealthy parents who have recently died — who decides to medicate herself into a year of sleep, with the help of a chaotically overprescribing psychiatrist named Dr. Tuttle. The novel follows her through the fog of her sedation, her relationship with her only friend Reva, and her gradual, paradoxical movement toward a kind of awakening. It is set in New York in 2000–2001, and the ending takes place on September 11, 2001.
Is My Year of Rest and Relaxation a comedy?
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is darkly comic — the scenes with Dr. Tuttle and her increasingly surreal pharmaceutical combinations are genuinely funny, and the narrator's affectless detachment from her own considerable privileges generates a dry, satirical comedy of manners. But it is also a serious novel about depression, grief, and the way American culture responds to suffering with the imperative of self-improvement rather than the acknowledgment of pain. Most readers find it both funnier and sadder than they expected.
What should I read after My Year of Rest and Relaxation?
Readers typically move to Eileen (2015), Moshfegh's Booker Prize-shortlisted debut — an unreliable narrator in a 1960s Massachusetts prison facility, with the same dark satirical voice as My Year of Rest. Lapvona (2022) is her most recent and most formally strange novel. For other recent literary novels with a similar voice of female detachment and dark comedy, Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan, Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney, and Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan are the closest companions.
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