The nameless narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh is selfish. Like, really selfish. She also makes sure to remind the reader every so often of how pretty and thin she is. But I can’t help but like her. Go figure. It’s the year 2000, and the narrator has decided to put her life on hold and hibernate for a year. She goes to the yellow pages and accidentally finds the worst psychiatrist in New York City. Faking insomnia to get sleeping pills, her psychiatrist throws every pill possibly related to this condition at her. This suits her just fine as she thinks up new cocktails of pharmaceuticals to take to make her sleep more and dream less.

I’ll be honest and say that hibernating for a year sounds extremely appealing. Who wouldn’t want to sleep around the clock? We see the reader only when she’s awake every couple of days. We follow her to the bodega around the corner where she gets two large coffees that she guzzles on the way back to her apartment where she watches Whoopi Goldberg movies until she falls back asleep. We attend the psychiatrist appointments, seeing just how frenzied and choppy Dr. Tuttle is. The narrator’s best friend Reva visits her at least once a week, and we see how much Reva irritates her. She says, “I loved Reva, but I didn’t like her anymore.”

One of the pills the narrator gets is one called Infermiterol. The upside of it is that it makes her sleep deeply; the downside is that she starts having blackout episodes where she goes shopping, makes spa appointments, and makes calls to people she’d really rather not talk to. She has no memory of these episodes, only seeing the aftermath of things having been moved around when she wakes up. On one such blackout, she wakes up on a train, wearing a white fur coat she doesn’t remember buying, headed to Reva’s mother’s funeral.

It’s hard to put my finger on what I liked about this book so much. The narrator is a borderline sociopath who has a toxic relationship with everyone in her life. She has an awful older on-again-off-again again boyfriend who keeps dumping her for women his age. Her relationship with her parents when they were alive was not ideal. In spite of all of this, there’s just something relatable about wanting to cocoon yourself in your bedroom and hopefully wake up when all your problems are solved.

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