My Year of Rest and Relaxation

moisturizing or exfoliating. No shaving. I left the apartment infrequently. I had all my bills on automatic payment plans. I'd already paid a year of property taxes on my apartment and on my dead parents' old house upstate. Rent money from the tenants in that house showed up in my checking account by direct deposit every month. Unemployment was rolling in as long as I made the weekly call into the automated service and pressed "1" for "yes" when the robot asked if I'd made a sincere effort to find a job. That was enough to cover the copayments on all my prescriptions, and whatever I picked up at the bodega. Plus, I had investments. My dead father's financial advisor kept track of all that and sent me quarterly statements that I never read. I had plenty of money in my savings account, too-enough to live on for a few years as long as I didn't do anything spectacular. On top of all this, I had a high credit limit on my Visa card. I wasn't worried about money.

I had started "hibernating" as best I could in mid-June of 2000. I was twenty-four years old. I watched summer die and autumn turn cold and gray through a broken slat in the blinds. My muscles withered. The sheets on my bed yellowed, although I usually fell asleep in front of the television on the sofa, which was from Pottery Barn and striped blue and white and sagging and covered in coffee and sweat stains.

I didn't do much in my waking hours besides watch movies. I couldn't stand to watch regular television. Especially at the beginning, TV aroused too much in me, and I'd get compulsive about the remote, clicking around, scoffing at everything and agitating myself. I couldn't handle it. The only news I could read were

both very funny and weirdly exhilarating. . . . As in Eileen, Moshfegh excels here at setting up an immediately intriguing character and situation, then amplifying the freakishness to the point that some rupture feels inevitable. Her confidence never flags; hers are the novels of a writer invigoratingly immune to uncertainty and self-doubt. Slate
 
One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years: a loopy, quietly furious pillhead whose Ambien ramblings and Xanaxed bitcheries somehow wend their way through sad and funny and strange toward something genuinely profound. Entertainment Weekly, Best Books of 2018

A strange, exhilarating triumph. . . . Moshfegh writes with a singular wit and clarity that, on its own, would be more than enough. (Her 2015 debut, Eileen, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Rest has already been optioned for film by Australian actress Margot Robbie). But the cumulative power of her narrative and the sharp turn she takes in its last 30 pages becomes nothing less than a revelation: sad, funny, astonishing, and unforgettable. Entertainment Weekly

Moshfegh s tale of self-care gone off the rails is a caustically funny skewering of artistic pretension and consumption, but also a meditation on grief, privilege and social cohesion. Huffington Post
 
The most exciting book of 2018 is about a girl sleeping for a year. . . . Ingenious, darkly comedic. . . . The novel speeds to the best last page of any book I ve likely ever read. Vice

This book isn t just buzzy and maniacally entertaining it s a mean-spirited, tenderhearted masterpiece. New York Post
 
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is the most poignant, vulnerable, mature, and dare I say it? sincere work that its gifted author has yet produced. Boston Globe

In flat, deadpan, unembellished prose recalling the cadences of Joan Didion and the clear-eyed candor of Mary Gaitskill, Moshfegh portrays the vacuous interior life (she has virtually no exterior life) of a narcissistic personality simultaneously self-loathing and self-displaying. . . . My Year of Rest and Relaxation is most convincing as an urbane dark comedy, sharp-eyed satire leavened by passages of morbid sobriety, as in a perverse fusion of Sex and the City and Requiem for a Dream. Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

Bizarrely fascinating. . . . Moshfegh knows how to spin perversity and provocation into fascination, and bleakness into surprising tenderness. NPR

It s another acerbic character study from an author making a career out of bringing absurdly unlikable people to life. No one can discomfit a reader quite like her. AV Club

One of the pleasures of reading Ottessa Moshfegh is that unusually, these days she rarely writes in the present tense. Instead, the sense of immediacy, the sense of being inside a character, the sense of things happening and having psychic value, both to the writer and her reader, is provided by the structure and content of her sentences. . . . One of the other pleasures of reading Moshfegh is her relentless savagery. All this is delivered as comic it is comic but it s not exactly funny, though of course we laugh. Guardian

Darkly hilarious . . . [Moshfegh s] the kind of provocateur who makes you laugh out loud while drawing blood. Vogue

Electrifying. . . a reminder that there is something to life outside the economic exchange of time for money and money for goods, even if that unnamed thing is obscure and perplexing and just a bit monstrous particularly as a woman. Literature may not have the all the answers, but it can show us the power and allure of saying no. Vanity Fair

I was cringing during every moment of Ottessa Moshfegh s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and yet I could not put the book down. . . . It is mostly, almost by juxtaposition, about the realness of a more subtle and very private expression of pain, no matter the cause, no matter how seemingly trivial. That s what kept me reading even as my cringing muscles grew sore: feeling in my screwed-up face, barked laughs, and watery eyes the translation of that private kind of pain into something I could share. Claire Benoit, The Paris Review

There s a casually intimidating power to Moshfegh s writing the deadpan frankness and softly cutting sentences that makes any comparison feel not quite right. Anne Diebel, London Review of Books