MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION SAVED MY LIFE
because I'm just like every other girl
Content warning: thoughts of suicide
I have just finished rereading one of my all-time favorite novels, My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, for the third time. I have documented my thoughts on the book each time I have read it. Here are all my thoughts re: My Year.
The following piece was originally published by The Daily Californian in September 2020. The website has since undergone many changes and the original article is no longer formatted correctly. Here is the article in full:
“My favorite days were the ones that barely registered. I’d catch myself not breathing, slumped on the sofa, staring at an eddy of dust tumbling across the hardwood floor in the draft, and I’d remember that I was alive for a second, then fade back out. Achieving that state took heavy dosages of Seroquel or lithium combined with Xanax, and Ambien or trazodone, and I didn’t want to overuse those prescriptions. There was a fine mathematics for how to mete out sedation.”
— Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
This past June I read Ottessa Moshfegh’s second novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I read it everywhere. I read it in bed, I read it at my desk, I read it on the floor, I read it on the living room couch while my roommate watched the BBC production of As You Like It.
I felt the book’s absence whenever I wasn’t reading it, and I read each page carefully and often multiple times because I was afraid of reaching the end. I read it in grocery store and post office and Target lines and in the passenger seat of moving cars. I read it at the park by my apartment while my brother played Animal Crossing on his Nintendo Switch. I even read it, most fittingly, while waiting for a pharmacist to fill my prescriptions, most of which are used at one point by the unnamed narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation in her never-ending quest for the perfect sleep.
The journey undergone by Moshfegh’s narrator in 2000–2001 New York is something of an anti-fever dream. A profoundly depressed WASP — white Anglo-Saxon Protestant — and art history graduate from Columbia University, she decides to sleep as much as possible with the help of a barrage of prescription drugs provided to her by an unethical psychiatrist. Yet for all the constant sedation and episodic blackouts experienced by our heroine, the grimy, textured landscape of her despair is vivid and bright, never obscured by the haze in which she dwells.
Different critics have different ideas about what Moshfegh is critiquing in this gut punch of a novel. What spoke to me the most, though, can be nicely summed up by a blurb on the back of my paperback copy taken from the first line of Jia Tolentino’s review in The New Yorker: “Ottessa Moshfegh is easily the most interesting contemporary American writer on the subject of being alive when being alive feels terrible.”
There’s this joke that we takers of heavy-duty psychiatric medications have: that we can’t panic, self-harm, have suicidal ideations or experience symptoms of psychosis, etc. etc. if we’re heavily sedated, which is essentially the main function of many antipsychotic medications and benzodiazepines. Seroquel, whose sedative effect the narrator eventually develops a tolerance for — as can be the case with long-term usage — is both the bane of my existence and the reason I’m still alive and kicking. It makes me exhausted beyond functioning at night, but hey, at least I get sleep.
On the one hand, part of me wanted to resist the instinct to connect to this narrator, to this privileged and beautiful blonde woman who lives off of an inheritance, payments from renting out her dead parents’ house and unemployment that she doesn’t actually need. I wanted to resist the instinct to find relatability in her flippant abuse of psychiatry, her ease of access to a pharmacopeia often elusive to those less privileged. I wanted to resolutely not see myself in her efforts to avoid the world, and in that avoidance, find respite.
On the other hand, I obsessively seek out mental health narratives in fiction and more often than not find myself still not sated. It’s fiction that I seek out because of that desire that a lot of us have: to see ourselves and our journeys as worthy of having a place in imaginations, not just in our already tumultuous and material realities.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is not a feel-good, recovery-driven mental health narrative, but no one can say that the narrator isn’t suffering from a variety of neuroses and pathological, self-destructive behaviors. In that sense, it is a mental health narrative, even if it’s not exactly providing a good example of relatability. It is that odd experience wherein the character’s journey is so specific that it somehow resonates broadly.
While reading, I frequently had eerie flashbacks to my own “year of rest and relaxation” — roughly October 2018 through December 2019. Unlike the narrator, I didn’t have the privilege of exiting the world almost completely, but I exited wherever I could and avoided everything possible, skipping class most of the time and giving in to the seemingly endless chemical sleep that can come so easily when taking sleeping pills, even though I was taking them as prescribed. It scares me sometimes how little I remember from that time other than the general dreariness before I un-ghosted my psychiatrist and had my medications adjusted for the better.
Still and all, in retrospect, I’ve picked up on a streak of optimism running through one of my bleakest years and the narrator’s bleak year — an ever-persistent mental resolution that someday, somehow, all of the darkness will be gone. A someday I’ll be happier, just not today mentality that ironically functions as part of the motivation behind neurotic, self-destructive behavior. That’s what the narrator thinks: that if she gets enough deep, deep sleep, then all the anger and frustration and general negativity she feels will gradually start to dissipate. To her, it is an inevitability, an oddly comforting thought as she abuses her pills for the sake of sleep. If she just sleeps it off, then someday soon she will wake up not just to herself but to the world, finally ready to engage instead of resist.
The journey to waking up, though, is truly and entirely chaotic. To me, it’s this chaos that renders the idea of avoidance as the easy way out patently misguided and almost laughable. There are few things in life I have found more grating than when my avoidant periods result in only having my consciousness as company. When the world is too loud and so is your brain, sleeping life away doesn’t just feel like the better option. It starts to feel like the only option.
“But I won’t always be like this,” I used to think to myself when I was present enough, “and I’ll make up for it later by being better.” I’ve often claimed that literature is my religion. My Year of Rest and Relaxation came to me at a time that felt perfect, a summer that was seeing me slipping back into the pathologies I thought I’d left behind: avoiding human interaction and ignoring everything that was happening in the world, instead rolling over in bed so my back was to the sunlight, closing my eyes and sleeping most of the day.
Eventually, I felt myself snapping out of that, finally open to actually having full conversations again. Surprise, surprise, but not really: I felt better for it. Once you get into the avoidant mindset, getting out feels impossible. You forget completely — even when days or even hours ago you knew this very well — that going against the instinct to avoid can oftentimes be an antidote to the bad feelings that drew you to avoidance in the first place.
Also easy to forget is that in expending energy to be as avoidant as possible, you’re still expending some kind of energy; you are, ironically, being present for yourself, proactive in a warped kind of way. That energy should go toward other things, better and healthier things, but in the thick of it, that possibility feels like an impossibility.
By the end of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the narrator has put a tremendous amount of time and energy into sleeping and avoiding, resulting in it becoming a full-blown project requiring (ironically) the help of others to fully implement. Her darkest moment yet comes in the form of suicidal ideation that has an oddly light and utilitarian tone; she resolves to kill herself if, at the end of the project, she still hasn’t managed to sleep away the darkness, marking herself with an expiration date.
She never fulfills this resolution, though, because despite it seeming like nothing good should come out of her avoidance, she does end up waking up to herself and the world. It was an ending that surprised me and left me with those hallmark literary aftershocks that come about when you’ve read something you know you’re going to be thinking about for a long, long time. After everything, all that chaos — all that, and she ends up better.
This is not to say that the novel condones self-destructive behaviors. It’s fiction, and no one should look to My Year of Rest and Relaxation as a blueprint for dealing with depression and suicidal ideation, which feels like far from being the point of the book. But it is valuable, I think, in its presentation of that self-destruction, a picture not so far from reality for a lot of people who are “alive when being alive feels terrible.” For all that avoiders are good at avoiding, what becomes impossible to avoid is the self-destruction that comes out of avoidance. Then the inevitable happens, and it does, as they say, Get Better.
I found something comforting about this novel because (ironically) it reminded me of the lack of control that comes with living with mental illness; this lack of control can be a curse, and yet sometimes it’s the very thing that swings us back into functionality. You can’t completely control when you’re depressed, and you can’t completely control when you’re happy. You’re not always doomed just because it feels like you should be right now. No one should strive to be avoidant, but when you’re already in it, there’s little to be done without explicit outside intervention. And once you’re out of it — and you will always, always come out of it — that period of darkness becomes a lesson learned, a sort of key for understanding that you are better now and that the seemingly elusive someday has come.
If it takes a “year of rest and relaxation” to get there, so be it.
If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide or self-harm or just needs to talk, here are some resources:
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1–800–273-TALK (8255)
Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741–741
International Suicide Hotlines
TrevorLifeline, TrevorChat and TrevorText (LGBTQ+ crisis support): 1–866–488–7386
Text “Trevor” to 1–202–304–1200
Trans Lifeline: US: (877) 565–8860
My Year of Rest and Relaxation has since become my favorite book, tied three ways with Penance by Eliza Clark and The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Rereading it for the third time this month, my experience was much the same as the first time I read it — reading it slowly, savoring every page.
However, my second reread back in June 2022 was a binge read. I think I managed to read it in 2–3 hours, all in a single sitting. Here is what I wrote about it on Goodreads after I finished it the second time:
“Pain is not the only touchstone for growth, I said to myself.”
i read this book two years ago in june 2020, when the world was ending, and the world is still ending. my personal world is ending, so i thought: what better comfort read than my year of rest and relaxation? gosh, i loved this book the first time i read it. i was obsessed. i still am. the first time i read it, it took me almost two weeks because i just didn’t want it to end. every page, every word, was a wonderful surprise. this time around, it only took me a few hours, and i annotated my physical copy since the first time i read it was on my kindle.
everything i wanted to say about this book i said in this essay (see above), one of the last pieces i ever wrote for my college paper. listen, i know it gets a lot of criticism as well as praise, and i’ve been listening to both the criticism and the praise for the last two years. the second time around, it was easier to see past my initial dazzlement and recognize where this book falls short. less so than in eileen, there are a lot of things that aren’t explored enough in a satisfying way: the narrator’s friendship with reva, the narrator’s relationship to art, the ending performance art aspect. but honestly, it doesn’t matter to me. this book feels so personal, i’m always going to think it’s perfect. objectively perfect, no, but subjectively perfect, yes. it is the most interesting mental health narrative i have ever read and it wasn’t even trying to be a mental health narrative. i spent 2019 sleeping my life away in a depressive haze, not to the extent that the narrator did because i’m not as privileged, but I Get It. i know everyone thinks this book is satire and it’s not supposed to be taken seriously but i can’t help but take it so seriously. the ending especially feels so special to me. there is so much hope there, so much joy and love, and somehow it doesn’t feel out of place in the wake of the chaos and misery that comes before that hope, joy, and love.
this is not my all time favorite moshfegh work, though. that would be homesick for another world, especially the story “bettering myself.” but reading her short stories makes my heart hurt, whereas this book just feels like a hug.
5/5 stars. one of the most Alex Bait books out there.
I think a lot about getting “pain is not the only touchstone for growth” tattooed on my right leg, running down the side of my thigh vertically. I also considered getting the cover art tattooed on my right thigh and was quoted $500 by an artist in Monterey that tattooes black and white portraits, but I think I’m going to be try and be more financially responsible moving forward…we are in scary economic times, my friends, and student loan debt is no joke!
Now, I think this is actually is my favorite Moshfegh work, not Homesick for Another World. “Bettering Myself” will always be my all-time favorite short story (tied two ways with “The Great Awake” by Julia Armfield) but as a whole My Year stands up so well compared to Homesick, which has some weak stories.
I had to check it out from the library for my third reread because my physical copy is extremely annotated and I just knew that my own past thoughts were going to PMO. I’m annoying and pretentious like that.
Also, my copy of My Year is signed and I don’t want to damage it. I met Ottessa Moshfegh in San Francisco shortly after my second reread. She did an event at Green Apple Books to promote Lapvona in 2022. She is a visionary and a genius and extremely intimidating in person. We weren’t allowed to take pictures with her.
I couldn’t think of something smart to say — I just told her that Homesick helped get me through my grief, which it did. I read it right after my dad died and it was the perfect escapism read. Homesick stuck with me for a long time, and inspired me to start writing short stories again.
She signed my copies of My Year, Homesick, and Lapvona. I brought Eileen and McGlue with me, too, but I felt too embarrassed to have her sign all of them…
Anyway, I liked the feel of the hardcover library copy in my hands. This time around, my reread took me almost an entire month. Like the first time, I read My Year in snippets, brief moments of entertainment on my couch, in my office, while supervising students, in a hotel room in Los Angeles.
Every time I open this book, it feels like coming home.
Thank you for sharing! I’m unfamiliar with this book, but this made me add it to my list. The Secret History has stayed with me like few books have, so that was an added incentive. I’m glad you’re doing better!