My Year of Rest and Relaxation
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Book Overview
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time, NPR, Vice, Bustle, The New York Times, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Entertainment Weekly, The AV Club, & Audible A New York Times Bestseller - New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century "One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years: a loopy, quietly furious pillhead whose Ambien ramblings and Xanaxed b*tcheries somehow wend their way through sad and funny and strange toward something genuinely profound." -- Entertainment Weekly "Darkly hilarious . . . Moshfegh's] the kind of provocateur who makes you laugh out loud while drawing blood." --Vogue From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes. Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong? My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.
Format:Paperback
Language:English
ISBN:0525522131
ISBN13:9780525522133
Release Date:June 2019
Publisher:Penguin Books
Length:304 Pages
Weight:0.56 lbs.
Dimensions:0.8" x 5.0" x 8.0"
Customer Reviews
7 ratings
4 stars
Published by INKwitchery , 2 months ago
MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION by Ottessa Moshfegh
If I were to describe this in one word it would be: absurd. And it was, but in a good way.
On the outside, our unnamed narrator has everything going for her. She’s young, beautiful, thin, a recent Columbia grad working at an art gallery in NY, and to top it all off, independently wealthy (due to the recent deaths of her parents). She has every privilege yet isn’t happy.
When you can manipulate your therapist into prescribing you a bajillion different medications just so you can sleep whole days away, you might have a problem.
This was a darkly comedic and satirical portrayal of a woman with mental health issues going through grief. She doesn’t have the capacity to deal with her loss so she turns to unhealthy coping mechanisms (prescription drugs). Reading this gave me so much anxiety because if anyone IRL did this, they’d be dead before the year was over!
You’ll either love this book or hate it. Me? I kinda loved it.
Rating: 4/5 ⭐️
You know what I did laugh
Published by lana , 6 months ago
I won't lie the book is easy to put down, but when it gets you it gets you. Sometimes it was hard to resonate with the main character other times it was highly amusing and got many chuckles out of me. Not a book you read in one sitting but something I'm glad I (eventually) finished
Ottessa Moshfegh is the author of the Millennium!
Published by CJ Booth , 1 year ago
Fresh, innovative, brilliant: Moshfegh is the author of the Millennium! The prose is crystalline and precise, and she has a way of presenting characters that is hilariously insightful and dead-on accurate.
If you are sad read this
Published by KatRose , 3 years ago
I went into this blind and came out heartbroken. I wanted to like her so bad but she is a broken protagonist. You basically experience a year long binge of various drugs from a self obsessed rich skinny girl in Manhattan. Her friend is the only character that gave me hope. The ending crushed me although I do feel like it was predictable after a certain point. I flipped the last page expecting closure but I think the entire point is that sometimes suffering is pointless. Even when we do it to ourselves.
Right book at the right time
Published by kenz , 3 years ago
Took a story with a lot of suffering and made it hilarious. Funny, sarcastic, addicting; I devoured this book.
Dark Humor and amazing
Published by MattyVally , 3 years ago
The book is not for everyone, it is filled with dark humor and the book tends to stay quite stagnant throughout. There is no huge twists or turns, but rather you follow the life of a depressed it girl in NYC as she choses to take a year off to sleep through her whole life with sleeping pills. The small details makes the book ironic and enjoyable.
A wonderful Read
Published by Katie U. , 4 years ago
I purchased this book for my Modern Literature course and I fell in love with it. Moshfegh has a talent for writing awful, weird, gross characters that you love to hate, and sometimes hate to identify with. This novel is a deep look at the consumerism in the 2000s, depression, classism, feminism, and privilege. I think if I had read this outside of my course I would have missed a lot of the deeper meaning and criticism of society in the early 2000s. If I had to compare this book to something else I would consider this the female, 2000s version of American Psycho and in a lot of ways Moshfegh is creating a dialogue to Bret Easton Ellis, without a lot of the subversive misogyny. I would recommend this book to anyone.
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