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Staff Reviews
Super funny, I managed to love someone with a name I never knew; Felt like I was reading my inner monologue.
— Phoenix
It's like Legally Blonde, but if Elle was terrible and hooked on sleeping meds to get through living in the early 2000's. Okay, so it's not at all like Legally Blonde, but it is a twisted look into post modernity and the supposed void that comes after. Also, if you have trouble sleeping, you might notice some of the meds she's taking, so it's like a sort of bingo!
— Ryan
Winter 2019 Reading Group Indie Next List
“Ottessa Moshfegh, more than any other writer I can think of, is great at capturing the feelings of despondency and malaise that come with living when and how we do. There are plenty of negative words to describe the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation—she’s detached and depressed, she’s cruel and unfeeling—but Moshfegh writes her with such care and specificity I felt like I could live in her head forever.”
— Theo Henderson, Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, WA
Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time, NPR, Amazon,Vice, Bustle, The New York Times, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Entertainment Weekly, The AV Club, & Audible
A New York Times Bestseller
“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.
About the Author
Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Her first book, McGlue, a novella, won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the Believer Book Award. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Granta, and have earned her a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, the Plimpton Discovery Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction; My Year of Rest and Relaxation, her second novel, was a New York Times bestseller.
“Ottessa Moshfegh, more than any other writer I can think of, is great at capturing the feelings of despondency and malaise that come with living when and how we do. There are plenty of negative words to describe the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation—she’s detached and depressed, she’s cruel and unfeeling—but Moshfegh writes her with such care and specificity I felt like I could live in her head forever.”