1,000 words on My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

The narrator in Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a catalyst for understanding the humanity that lives inside the mentally ill and cruel. Having been raised in an unloving but privileged home and following the death of both her parents, one to cancer, the other to suicide, the contemptuous narrator resolves to “revive” herself by taking an obscene number of sleeping pills for an entire year. The only person who truly loves the narrator is her friend Reva, the protagonist’s foil. Reva struggles with her own set of challenges, including the death of her mother and a toxic office relationship. She heedlessly cites self-focused self-help books—readily believing clichés—but is resilient against hardship. Online critics often prefer Reva and deem the narrator’s decision to hibernate self-indulgent and callous. However, the story is far more interesting and informative about the complexities of mental illness after establishing that the narrator is, in fact, very human despite her brutish tone and uncouth game plan. Reading the novel is, therefore, a process of parsing out the protagonist’s conscience and weighing it against her vibrant detestation of the world.

Of course, she is human. She feels shame, like anyone in a depraved state. For instance, she insinuates feeling too embarrassed to get coffee anywhere besides her local bodega: “[The bodega] was close, and the coffee was consistently bad, and I didn’t have to confront anyone ordering a brioche bun or no-foam latte … No sterilized professionals, no people on dates” (Moshfegh 5). Should she have run into children with runny noses and Swedish au pairs, readers can presume she’d feel undignified.

There are many latent indications that the narrator wants to be good: a member of her community and a person worth loving. For instance, she relishes her apartment’s trash chute, which “made me feel important, like I was participating in the world … I was contributing … [and] connecting” (115). Even in her withdrawn state, the narrator yearns for a sense of belonging and purpose. Moreover, she has always wanted to be loved by her parents. She admits, “I wanted a mother … I wanted her to hold me while I cried … She was usually passed out in her bed with the door locked” (147). On the day of her father’s death, she pleads, “Promise that you’ll send me a sign … Promise me you’ll come through for me somehow,” though he jerks his hand away (140). The narrator sounds markedly different in her stories of seeking parental love. She seems naive and needy, not jaded, sardonic, and curt. While it’s hard to distill her personality before becoming a scornful recluse, readers can see that she once deserved concern and care and had a softer attitude.

Perhaps the narrator’s most humanizing feature is actually her pursuit of sleep: the entire purpose is to reemerge as a clear-minded human being. She writes, “I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn” (51). The protagonist designs a precarious scheme to become someone like Reva, who can treat their “past life as an inheritance” and not a fateful anchor (264). Reva’s character sheds light on who the narrator will hopefully become after resting: someone with a vigorous spirit. Moshfegh captures Reva’s spirit literally on 9/11: “… she is beautiful … a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake” (289). Still, the narrator’s year-long seclusion serves a narrative purpose. It plumbs the depths of mental illness and the need for drastic life changes to escape depression’s throes. While there is little reason to argue that the narrator’s hibernation is safe or kosher, her dilemma speaks volumes about the human pursuit of recovery while struggling with an abyss of depression, loneliness, and fury.

Having established that the narrator is human, a question arises: what is at the core of her pain that can only be evaded through sleep? The answer is vanity. While Reva is the obvious martyr, dying on 9/11 after leading a life of emotional resilience, the narrator deserves some credit, too: she is suffocating because she perceives vanity to be a widespread poison that prevented her mother from ever loving her. She remarks at her mother’s funeral, ‘I’d never seen her real hair before,” which represents her mother’s emotional distance, just as the locked door. Her mother’s rejection of vulnerability leaves her daughter emotionally abandoned, never to have a candid connection. Hence, the narrator’s comment, “She took herself out before we could ever have a real conversation” (152).

Upon hearing that her mother is comatose, the narrator says, “My knees didn’t buckle. I didn’t fall to the ground. I was at the sorority house. I could hear girls in the kitchen chatting about their fat-free diets and how not to ‘bulk up’ at the gym” (151). On a sensory level, this juxtaposition depicts the narrator’s numbness evolving alongside superficiality; she fairly associates the two during moments of distress. Cosmetics acquire cosmically painful significance. She writes, “I couldn’t have described with any accuracy how I was ‘doing.’ And nobody called to ask me,” regarding her so-called sorority sisters (148). This highlights the vacant quality of her social life and her expanding disengagement from fair-weather friends.

Having been left completely alone in the world and having been raised in a household bereft of affection, it’s no wonder that the narrator is miserable. She deserves credit for becoming a Frankenstein-ish character, half-dead, half-alive, holding a mirror to the vanity that saturates her world; it’s no easy feat. It’s her prerogative. She deserves credit for the fact that her plan works; she comes out of her slumber, having transcended her pain and reconnected with her humanity. Ultimately, the narrator’s hibernation is a high-stakes attempt to reclaim her autonomy and tenderness in a world that has failed her. Her unorthodox road to recovery may be fraught with contradictions, but it speaks to the human potential to reawaken from suffering.

Works Cited:

Moshfegh, Ottessa. My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Penguin Press, 2018.