I must conclude that Mosfegh is not an author I will ever enjoy. Her partiality for unlikable, unfiltered female narrators with little interest in societal (or reader) expectations. I find it very admirable but for some reason I can't enjoy it. After a few chapters the intense self-absorption of these characters becomes dull and in this offering there is not even the frankly bizarre plot that the earlier Eileen descended into to liven it up.

There’s not much plot to My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Otessa Moshfegh’s follow-up to the dark and brilliant Eileen. Set in New York over a 15 month period from June 2000, the novel follows our 20-something narrator who, despite wealth and beauty, is bored with her life working at a stylish gallery and dealing with her on/off boyfriend so decides to sleep for a year courtesy of medication from her rather unhinged doctor.

For a woman who seems to have anything, it is a strange decision, but her ennui with the modern world is clarified through visits from her friend Reva, a bulimic whose life is not turning out the way she wants it to. As she falls into a haze of drugs, sleep and Whoopi Goldberg videos, it becomes apparent that her need to retreat may be the most sensible option.

How much you enjoy My Year of Rest and Relaxation will depend on your tolerance for Moshfegh’s sharp, caustic humour. She is excellent at eviscerating whole swathes of society – the art world, bankers, and the medical profession – with a dark humour that is particularly satisfying. For the seemingly slight nature of the plot, My Year of Rest and Relaxation reveals itself to be anything but, exploring the nature of grief, the emptiness of consumerism and societies bland and blind sense of conformity.

This book was interesting, to say the least. I’ve never read anything like it - I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing! I read a review that said they enjoyed it but wouldn’t read it again, and I think that summarises how I feel. I read it quite quickly (although I did have a 3 hour bus journey to kill) and it was intriguing enough to mostly keep my attention. But it is so bloody miserable. If I had read this a couple of years ago, it would have sent my spiralling. I was just left feeling uneasy and a bit disgusted by the main character, whose self-centred attitude and privilege make it difficult to connect with her. I can’t help but compare it with A Little Life - another thoroughly miserable book, but one that captured my heart and I know I will reread. The absence of anything heartwarming or likeable means that this book won’t be staying on my shelf.

This book features a very depressed character indulging herself in feeling rubbish. It's great, reading about this state of mind, from this very different angle. Love it!

A strange, amusingly cynical novel about a young, pretty, and overprivileged woman living in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, who decides to put herself through a year-long drug-infused period of hibernation and essentially sleep for a year to then, as she believes, reemerge into society as a better, happier person. As the story develops we also start to realise that this might be her own, strange way of processing (or rather - avoiding) her feelings of grief.

I consider Ottessa Moshfegh to be one of the most interesting new authors in recent years. I previously read and loved Eileen and McGlue, both gritty and provocative character studies that showcase Moshfegh's talent of exploring the mental landscape of deeply flawed and often extremely unpleasant characters in an unflinching and fascinating way. This book is no exception, but contrary to the downtrodden, marginalized people in her other novels, the protagonist of My Year of Rest & Relaxation is a jaded Colombia graduate with a huge inheritance, so her problems mainly originate from her own damaged psyche.

What I enjoyed most about this book were the protagonist's frank, darkly humorous observations on modern day society and, particularly, the snobbish and shallow world of the New York art scene that she is very familiar with from her job at a hip art gallery. It's a bold choice by the author to make this judgemental and extremely unlikeable person the central focus of the novel. At the same time, it was refreshing to read the thoughts of a character who is not really seeking the reader's pity or empathy.

Although this wasn't my favourite novel by Moshfegh, mainly due to its somewhat repetitive narrative, it once again presented a very strong and unique voice that was very engrossing to read.

There is a brutal exterior to this novel that can be hard to break down but with persistence you find a warm novel, of madness, and holistic experiments, as the young woman at the centre of this novel wants to sleep for a year. The novel deals with issues, such as class, race, and friendship. It can be incredibly crass but managers to keep things above board. It’s a challenge but a worthy one and whilst I detested the ending, it is sure to get people talking, and its final images are unforgettable and will leave one thinking about it for a long time after they have finished.

My Life of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, (Penguin), £12.99, seems a sleepy one from its synopsis but is actually a whip-cracking smart book that keeps all of Ottessa’s trademark darkness yet wraps this up in an ever-developing plot. I absolutely adored this - addictive and challenging.

Here we follow our narrator – a rich young New Yorker whose life on the Upper East Side is funded by her hefty inheritance – as she consciously and deliberately attempts to medicate herself into a narcotic hibernation. Alienation, depression and rational thought blur to cause us to questions whether our narrator is mad or sane. And given that we are set in 2000 – the suggestion of what’s to come with 9/11 hanging thick in the air – this terrific book also causes us to question the very definition of a fulfilled life.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) seems to be a novel suffering from split personality: on the one hand, it is a book about a woman who, in an attempt of self-erasure, resigns herself to becoming her own blank canvas (and, ultimately, her own art); on the other, however, the book itself, in its sharp dismissal of its own protagonist, is the one doing the act of self-erasure, like some kind of self-destructing art work.

The story centres on the unnamed narrator, a 24-year-old woman who decides to go into hibernation. It’s the year 2000 and we are in New York. Both of her parents have died while she was in college, and she has just been fired from her job at an art gallery in Chelsea, where she had started working as a receptionist after her graduation from Columbia University. Our narrator is living off her parent’s money, on the Upper East Side, in an apartment she bought with her inheritance.

Having found a quack psychiatrist on the phone book, she indulges herself in ever more prolonged periods of sleep, with the help of an array of pills supplied to her by her doctor. “Sleep felt productive”, she says. As our protagonist sleeps away her days, she begins to experience strange blackouts, where she even sleepwalks through the city, only to wake up later and find out that she has gone dancing, rearranged her furniture, or bought useless stuff online. “This was the beauty of sleep—reality detached itself and appeared in my mind as casually as a movie or a dream.”

We are tempted to read her hibernation as a result of her suffering over her parents’ recent deaths. However, this idea is soon overcome, when we find out how distant and cold her family dynamics was. Recalling her mother, our protagonist cannot help but see her with some disdain: “I remembered watching her ‘put her face on,’ as she called it, and wondering if one day I’d be like her, a beautiful fish in a man-made pool, circling and circling, surviving the tedium only because my memory can contain what is imprinted on the last few minutes of my life, constantly forgetting my thoughts.”

Our protagonist also lacks meaningful emotional ties, and seems to be unable to empathise with anyone. Her abusive boyfriend has recently broken up with her, and her loneliness is interrupted only by regular visits from Reva, a former college acquaintance she despises. “‘I wanted to be an artist, but I had no talent,’ I told her. ’Do you really need talent?’ That might have been the smartest thing Reva ever said to me.”

Our narrator soon comes to the conclusion that her life would be better, if she completely retreated from the world and slept all the time. Her aim is not as much to sedate unbearable feelings (she does not seem to have any), but to sedate the world outside, a world which she cannot help but hate. “I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me.” Gradually, her hibernation becomes a kind of art project: to “disappear completely, then reappear in some new form”, as if coming out to the other side in a new form, cleansed, and empty. Like a blank canvas.

Our narrator may have abandoned long ago her ambitions to be an artist (if there ever were any ambitions), but she slowly wakes up to the possibility of becoming her own art experiment. She then turns her life over to an artist she had met from her work in the gallery, and they agree that she’ll be drugged, locked up in her apartment for four months, while he films her as she sleeps (and sleepwalks). In exchange for the ‘material’, he must feed her and provide her with anything she needs. Her mission – as she calls it – is to purge her mind, remaking her own self. If she truly achieves that, it is questionable, but she definitely transforms herself into some kind of art piece.

I confess that I appreciate the book more for what it has tried to do, than for what it has actually managed to achieve. I have the strong feeling that it would have fared better, if it had been a short-story, instead of a novel. As it is, the book keeps circling around itself, like an idea in search of a way out. It reads as if there were something dormant in it; we wait and wait for a wake-up call that never really happens.

Our protagonist turns herself into the best personification of the culture of individualistic sleepwalkers she most despises. By proclaiming her ‘I’d prefer not to’, she turns herself precisely into that which she most scorns; and she becomes an accomplice of her own objectification. She becomes a strange mixture of Oblomov and Sleeping Beauty, with a touch of Bartleby, for her refusal to incorporate the American ideal – personified in Reva – of a self-made woman who prospers through hard work. Our protagonist simply turns her back to all that, and, rather than a self-made person, she chooses to be more like a self-made half-living object.

This book is a great read. I am recommending it to people daily. They look askance when I give them a brief plot outline so the advice is: read it. It's an unlikely page-turner, unexpectedly funny and sad by turns and an off kilter look at pre 9/11 New York.

Ottessa Moshfegh has a particular talent for writing about vile characters in an engaging way. Her novel “Eileen” portrayed an excruciatingly self-conscious protagonist recalling a dark mystery from many year ago. But where the protagonist of that novel was repulsed and embarrassed by her own body, the unnamed narrator of “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” takes easy pride in her beauty and size two figure. But she doesn’t see this as an advantage as she slyly observes “Being pretty only kept me trapped in a world that valued looks above all else.” She’s an art history graduate that comes from a privileged background who sets herself the goal of sleeping as much as possible for a year. Her reasons for this goal are elusive at first and appear to be nothing more than the whim of a jaded spoiled young woman, but gradually it takes on more poignancy as she describes her difficult relationship with her mother and the disappointingly shallow experience of working in an art gallery. This takes place in New York City over the years 2000-2001 and she seems to be asking during this ominous period in which George Bush Jr takes office whether it’s more sensible to sleep through life than live it. Reading this novel is perversely pleasurable with its weary view of the world and the narrator’s overwhelming devotion to her hero Whoopi Goldberg who embodies for her the idea that “Nothing was sacred.”

The narrator has an all-consuming scepticism about human emotions and can’t engage in meaningful exchanges. She reflects “I felt nothing. I could think of feelings, emotions, but I couldn’t bring them up in me.” Her only friend is an old college buddy named Reva who is perpetually insecure, suffers from an eating disorder and aspires to obtain the narrator’s privilege and waist line. But the narrator barely tolerates her and breezily ignores Reva when she confesses that her mother is suffering from cancer or that she has an unwanted pregnancy. Equally any emotion Reva displays towards the narrator is awkwardly accepted like when Reva hugs her at one point and the narrator observes how “I felt like a praying mantis in her arms.” The narrator regularly sees a quack psychiatrist named Dr Tuttle (when she doesn’t sleep through their scheduled appointment) but only in order to obtain worryingly strong doses of sleep medication to aide her in sinking into an unconscious oblivion. Hilariously her doctor can’t even recall that the narrator’s parents are both dead even after she’s told this multiple times and makes extensive notes.

It’s rational to assume at first that the narrator’s desire for sleep is connected to the loss of her parents, especially her emotionally absent mother who she only ever felt close to when they were unconscious in the same bed. But this easy interpretation of the narrator’s goal is refuted when she reflects about her mother’s death: “the particular sadness of a young woman who has lost her mother – complex and angry and soft, yet oddly hopeful. I recognized it. But I didn’t feel it inside of me. The sadness was just floating around in the air. It became denser in the graininess of shadows.” Instead of building relationships or looking for a sense of self-worth when she’s conscious she only seeks to lose herself in an endless stream of rewatched VHS tapes of movies from the 80s and 90s. It gives her a temporary sense of detachment from reality that can only be perfectly realised in “Good strong American sleep.”

While it can be enjoyable to indulge in the narrator’s frank and nihilistic view of the world, the novel took on more poignancy for me as I pondered why Moshfegh set it at this particular point in American history. It’s a period leading up to an event which is ominously foreshadowed throughout the novel when it’s casually mentioned the narrator’s ex-boyfriend works in the Twin Towers. It ultimately began to feel like the author wished she could wake up from the string of tragic events and toxic culture that has plagued the country in the 21st century thus far and dismiss it all as a nightmare. Looking at it this way, it begins to make sense that the narrator considers “I would risk death if it meant I could sleep all day and become a whole new person.” The great tragedy of this novel is that the narrator can’t ever escape herself or the history she’s trapped in.

I really, really loved this book. I thought Eileen was great but My Year of Rest and Relaxation is even better. I was sucked into the narrator’s life. I loved her voice, dark though it was, dark and addictive. I thought the cover was amazing. This book like Eileen is not an easy read. Moshfegh writes about the dark shit that other writers shy from and try to gloss over. There’s no gloss here, only raw, painful reality. The characters are great in this book. The narrator’s tells the story and her voice is fantastic. Dr Tuttle is such a terrible psychiatrist, enabling the narrator’s pill-popping she becomes almost funny. Reva, her so-called best friend is insufferable as well, always trying too hard. She’s a comic genius. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a brilliant character-study. I’ve never read anything quite like it. Nice characters are dull and boring. I’ve got a thing for dark ladies. This book is stunning.

I received an e-copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a strange novel. The protagonist, a young woman recently bereft of her parents, decides that the cure to her various woes is simply to hibernate for a year. To that end, she finds herself a distracted psychiatrist who doesn't mind providing her with a whole array of anti-insomnia, anti-anxiety medication. The one challenge is to find a combination that would make it possible for her to sleep without a danger of sleepwalking (and sleep-spending money, and sleep-calling her boyfriend, and so on).

While undoubtedly the writing has some charm and the book has the potential of becoming a cult favourite (for its sollipsistic exploration of the delusion that the anxieties of modern society can only be ameliorated by consuming one's weight in psychotropic medication), I found it, overall, rather annoying. In the end, there just isn't enough content in this to justify making it a novel-- it would make more sense as a short story.

Just finished - My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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Synopsis : New York City, the year 2000. The city glitters with possibility for our narrator, a recent Columbia graduate with a job in a fancy art gallery who lives in the Upper East Side in an apartment her inheritance has already paid for. However, she’s not happy. There’s a dark, vacant space inside of her that she’s convinced she can fix with just a little rest. Aided by her doctor and an arsenal of medication, she embarks on a mission to sleep for an entire year.
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Review : I was not a big fan of Moshfegh’s last book, Eileen, so I was a bit apprehensive about trying this one. Thankfully, I was proven wrong and I loved this. Our narrator is a fantastically complex character. Both empathetic and apathetic, she’s awful, mean, unapologetically narcissistic but not superficial. She and her mission to complete annihilation (just for a year though) through medication and slee are so fascinating and compelling I found myself picking this up more and more, desperate to find out what happened next. There are few side characters: her psychologist (the world’s worst doctor), her best friend Reva and her skeevy ex-boyfriend but all are equally as terrible yet just as captivating. Moshfegh’s writing is so beautiful and brutal in this I was really blown away by this.

Looking at her from the outside, she has everything one could wish for: she is blond, pretty, thin, a Columbia graduate, stylish without effort and she has a job at a gallery. Due to her inheritance, she can afford an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. But that’s just one side of the medal, her relationship with Trevor has been all but healthy, her parents never showed any affection and thus losing them both when she was in college was a minor affair. What she is lacking is an aim in life, something that gives her a reason for being alive. She feels exhausted and just wants to sleep until everything is over. She slowly extends her time in bed, she even falls asleep at work and then, finally, she decides to hibernate. A crazy therapist provides her with medication that allows more and more hours of sleep at a time. She hopes that after a year of rest, she will awake as somebody new.

Ottessa Moshfegh is a US-American writer who earned a degree in Creative Writing from Brown University and whose short stories were received with positive reviews. After her novella “McGLue”, her first novel “Eileen” was published in 2015 and made it on the shortlist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. Having chosen a mostly unsympathetic protagonist for her former novel, I found it much easier so sympathise with her narrator in “My Year of Rest and Relaxation”.

The young woman who is portrayed is quite typical in a certain way. She is the modern New Yorker who takes part in the glittery art circus, is a part of a subculture of believes itself to be highly reflective and innovative. At a certain point, the superficiality becomes exhausting and the aimless tittle-tattle and prattle don’t provide any deeper insight.

“The art at Ducat was supposed to be subversive irreverent, shocking, but was all just canned counterculture crap, “punk, but with money”.

Also her relationship does not go beyond superficial sex and one-night-stands that lead to nothing. Added to this is the easy availability of all kinds of drugs, of therapists who themselves are too crazy to detect any serious illness in their clients and therefore just fill in any prescription they are asked for. Even though the plot starts in 2000, the characters are quite typical for the 1990s and they need a major event to wake them up and bring them back to real life.

The narrator tries to flee the world and takes more and more pills mixed with each other, as a result she is sleepwalking, even gets a new haircuts and orders masses of lingerie without knowing. Her radius is limited to her blog, her only human contacts are the Egyptians at the bodega at the corner where she buys coffee, the doorman of her apartment house and Reva, her best friend who still cares about her. Even though she is bothered by the things she does when she is not awake, she has become that addicted that she cannot let go anymore.

Even though the protagonist is highly depressive and seeing how badly she copes with her life is hard to endure in a way, the novel is also hilarious. I especially liked her meetings with her therapist since Dr. Tuttle is riotous in her eccentric ways and their dialogues are highly comical – despite the earnestness of their actual topics. Ottessa Moshfegh most certainly earns a place among to most relevant authors of today.

One word review: Uncompromising

Rambling review: I knew this book had been receiving high praise, but I loved it even more than I expected.

Bold, edgy, modern, unapologetic. It is darkly humorous, has deep despair and trauma, yet is softly tender as well. It reminded me of A Line Made By Walking in that it addresses mental health without strictly labelling the health conditions. 

The character is not likeable, the events are unrealistic, the drugs are unbelievable - and yet, I still found it relatable in that there times where I have wanted to curl up, months where sleep has been the only reprieve, when everything else was just too much, despite a picture perfect exterior. I read it with an almost jealousy that she had the financial and social means to both indulge herself in this deep depression and (relatively painlessly) remove herself from it to start "anew".

There was also the unexpected dynamic of Reva and her profession. I recently left my job at an insurance broker - I worked at the competitor to Marsh, funnily enough. This means I know that the levels hit by the planes on 9/11 were those occupied by insurance brokers. When I read that she was being transferred to the Towers, that hit me like a punch in the stomach. Some may say that a 9/11 reference was inevitable given the time frame the novel is set in, but I still felt a looming dread. 

A book I will keep close to my heart and certainly reread. 

P.S. The comment about keeping fancy shopping bags as an outwards display of wealth made me chuckle. I know someone who did that, who used a small Selfridges bag as their lunch bag, even though it was battered and ripped. 

P.P.S. Turns out, this was the hundredth book I've read this year!

For a novel dealing with such a potentially depressing theme, this was surprisingly entertaining - I really enjoyed the narrator’s wit and her dry take on the hyped-up New York art scene and the people she encounters in the city, her drug-pushing ‘doctor’ in particular. A woman on the edge, cynical beyond her years, hoping to reinvent herself as the happier, carefree person she ought to be given her wealth, youth and good looks, we tune into her musings about her life to date, short on love and purpose, and follow her few excursions outside during her waking moments over the course of a year spent mostly alone and heavily sedated. Almost too much information about bodily functions, springing from her intense introspection, and, since her days follow the same pattern, there is a deal of blow-by-blow repetition - all leading up to a final shocking image. The alarm has gone off, time to wake up and face the new day - as a new version of herself, changed forever, as the rest of America was, by the events of September 2001.

Excellent book, classy writing, an inspired choice of cover artwork, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a clever and strangely hypnotic novel about a woman who goes into a narcotic-induced sleep-haze for a year. The narrator is privileged and empty; her Upper East Side apartment is paid for and she can use the rent from her parents' old house to cover her bills. So, aided by a terrible psychiatrist who will prescribe her anything for her supposed insomnia, she goes to sleep. For a year, she endeavours to wake only when necessary, to live by routine, seeing only the guys at the bodega and occasionally the best friend she mostly dislikes.

Moshfegh's style is fascinating, drawing the reader into the narrator's strange world and mindset, seeing only what she sees upon waking. As might be expected from a novel mostly about someone trying to sleep away life, there isn't a huge amount of narrative, but that is the point, and the immediate concerns of the narrator become the drama of the novel. Underneath are flashes of New York in 2000 and 2001: politics, 9/11, a depressing world of diets and art fads. At times it feels like other novels written around that time, using a character's shocking use of various prescription drugs to enforce sleep to show the extremes of escaping society, but it also feels different, focused very much on the narrator and less on mocking the culture around her. And in this current world in 2018 of unceasing news updates and social media, the idea of sleeping to escape it all makes even more sense.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a darkly comic, downright weird novel that takes the trope of a main character withdrawing from the world and turns it into a purposeful retreat into narcotic oblivion. It mustn't be written off as yet another New York novel, as it is really about withdrawing from the city, withdrawing from the outside world, and being self-obsessed in a self-destructive seeming way that may just be a rebirth.

"There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake."

Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen was a stand out inclusion on the 2016 Man Booker shortlist but not necessarily in a good way: my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1756635147

The mid 20s narrator of her latest novel, having lost her job in a contemporary art studio but financially secure after the death of both her parents, decides to take "a year of rest and relaxation." Except this is a rather extreme version, she decided to effectively hibernate, telling a friend:

“It’s natural, people used to hibernate all the time.”

“People never hibernated. Where are you getting this?”"

What that means in practice is doping herself to the gills on as many sleep inducing prescription drugs as she can, and between periods of sleep binge watching movies on her VHS. A typical passage (there are many such in the book) reads:

"Night was falling. I felt tired, heavy, but not exactly sleepy. So I took another Nembutal, watched Presumed Innocent, then took a few Lunestas and drank the second bottle of funeral wine, but somehow the alcohol undid the sleeping pills, and I felt even more awake than before. Then I had to vomit, and did so. I had drunk too much. I lay back down on the sofa. Then I was hungry, so I ate the banana bread and watched Frantic three times in a row, taking a few Ativan every thirty minutes or so. But I still couldn’t sleep. I watched Schindler’s List, which I hoped would depress me, but it only irritated me, and then the sun came up, so I took some Lamictal and watched The Last of the Mohicans and Patriot Games, but that had no effect either, so I took a few Placidyl and put The Player back in. When it was over, I checked the digital clock on the VCR. It was noon."

Moshfegh's strength as an author lies in creating some memorably awful characters:

- the artists and staff at the gallery where the narrator works:

"The art at Ducat was supposed to be subversive, irreverent, shocking, but was all just canned counterculture crap, “punk, but with money."

Ping Xi’s work first appeared at Ducat as part of a group show called “Body of Substance,” and it consisted of splatter paintings, à la Jackson Pollock, made from his own ejaculate. He claimed that he’d stuck a tiny pellet of powdered colored pigment into the tip of his penis and masturbated onto huge canvases. He titled the abstract paintings as though each had some deep, dark political meaning . Blood-Dimmed Tide, and Wintertime in Ho Chi Minh City and Sunset over Sniper Alley. Decapitated Palestinian Child. Bombs Away, Nairobi. It was all nonsense, but people loved it.

Natasha had cast me as the jaded underling, and for the most part, the little effort I put into the job was enough. I was fashion candy. Hip decor. I was the bitch who sat behind a desk and ignored you when you walked into the gallery, a pouty knockout wearing indecipherably cool avantgarde outfits."

- her equally dysfunctional best friend Reva, their relationship seeming to revolve around basking in each other's misery:

"It made me a little jealous to think of Reva being depressed and dependent on anyone but me.

Jealousy was one thing Reva didn’t seem to feel the need to hide from me. Ever since we’d formed a friendship, if I told her that something good happened, she’d whine “No fair”often enough that it became a kind of catchphrase that she would toss off casually, her voice flat. It was an automatic response to my good grade, a new shade of lipstick, the last popsicle, my expensive haircut. "No fair.""

The phrase is most commonly deployed in jealously at her size 2 vs Reva's size 4, but when she decides to give Reva pick of the extensive wardrobe of designer clothes she no longer needs to hibernate, the pregnant Reva takes the bait:

"“This is good motivation to stick to my diet,” Reva said, lugging the bags into the living room. “Atkins, I think. Bacon and eggs for the next six months. I think I can do it if I really set my mind to it. The doctor said the abortion won’t cause any dramatic weight loss, but I’ll take it. I’ll take whatever I can get. Especially now. Size twos are a challenge for my hips, you know.""

- her 'boyfriend' of sorts Trevor, whose arrogance and completre neglect of her needs seems to feed her lack of self-worth:

"Back then, I interpreted Trevor’s sadism as a satire of actual sadism."

She contrast him to the artistic types she meets through her gallery work:

"They focused on “abstract ideas”and developed drinking problems to blot out the self-loathing they preferred to call “existential ennui.”It was easy to imagine those guys masturbating to Chloë Sevigny, to Selma Blair, to Leelee Sobieski. To Winona Ryder. Trevor probably masturbated to Britney Spears. Or to Janis Joplin. I never understood his duplicity. And Trevor had never wanted to “kneel at the altar.”I could count the number of times he’d gone down on me on one hand. When he’d tried, he had no idea what to do, but seemed overcome with his own generosity and passion, as though delaying getting his dick sucked was so obscene, so reckless, had required so much courage, he’d just blown his own mind.

But at least Trevor had the sincere arrogance to back up his bravado. He didn’t cower in the face of his own ambition, like those hipsters. And he knew how to manipulate me—I had to respect him for that at least, however much I hated him for it."

- and her batty psychotherapist Dr Tuttle who keeps her well supplied with a cocktail of pills:

"There was no shortage of psychiatrists in New York City, but finding one as irresponsible and weird as Dr. Tuttle would be a challenge.

Dr. Tuttle explained that there was a way to maximize insurance coverage by prescribing drugs for their side effects, rather than going directly to those whose main purposes were to relieve my symptoms, which were in my case “debilitating fatigue due to emotional weakness, plus insomnia, resulting in soft psychosis and belligerence.” That’s what she told me she was going to write in her notes. She termed her prescribing method “ecoscripting,” and said she was writing a paper on it that would be published soon. “In a journal in Hamburg.” So she gave me pills that targeted migraine headaches, prevented seizures, cured restless leg syndrome, prevented hearing loss."

- and her mother... Ultimately her parents seem to be the root cause of her issues, her mother even claiming to have put valium in her baby milk to stop her crying. Even her fondest memories of mother / daughter bonding don't exactly suggest a functional relationship:

"Around Christmas each year, she’d take me to the mall. She’d buy me a single chocolate at the Godiva store, then we’d walk around all the shops and my mother would call things “cheap” and “hick-style” and “a blouse for the Devil’s whore. She kind of came alive at the perfume counter. “This one smells like a hooker’s panties.” Those outings to the mall were the few times we had any fun together."

And when her mother dies, of a deliberately ingested cocktail of drink and drugs, following the narrator's "joyless, sterile, serious" father's death from cancer, she finds a suicide note:

"The letter was totally unoriginal. She felt she wasn’t equipped to handle life, she wrote, that she felt like an alien, a freak, that consciousness was intolerable and that she was scared of going crazy. “Good-bye,” she wrote, then gave a list of people she’d known. I was sixth on the list of twenty-five. I recognized some of the names— long abandoned girlfriends, her doctors, her hairdresser. I kept the letter and never showed it to anybody.

Occasionally, over the years, when I’d felt abandoned and scared and heard a voice in my mind say, “I want my mommy,” I took the note out and read it as a reminder of what she’d actually been like and how little she cared about me. It helped. Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion."

Parts of the novel were very enjoyable but the problem for me was that the main character herself didn't seem so well developed as Eileen. And I think the cause of that was that most of what we hear from her is a tediously repetitive list of movies watched, pills gulped, and odd activities undertaken while in a near catatonic state, which at times feel mere filler.

From interviews this was clearly a cathartic novel for the author but I could not muster much sympathy with the main character (in contrast to say Helen in Patty Yumi Cottreĺl's wonderful Sorry to Disturb the Peace).

Although the recurrent movie character Whoopi Goldberg expresses well the author's writing ethos:

"Watching Star Trek as an adolescent was when I first came to regard Whoopi Goldberg with the reverence she deserves. Whoopi seemed like an absurd interloper on the U.S.S. Enterprise. Whenever she appeared on-screen, I sensed she was laughing at the whole production. Her presence made the show completely absurd. That was true of all her movies, too. Whoopi in her nun’s habit. Whoopi dressed like a churchgoing Georgian in the 1930s with her Sunday hat and Bible. Whoopi in Moonlight and Valentino alongside the pasty Elizabeth Perkins. Wherever she went, everything around her became a parody of itself, gauche and ridiculous. That was a comfort to see. Thank God for Whoopi. Nothing was sacred. Whoopi was proof."

The ending of the novel is very heavily telegraphed. When Reva gets a new job in the terrorism risk unit of Marsh in the World Trade Centre, in 2001, is pretty clear how things are going to end. But then one of Moshfegh's characteristics is that she cares not at all for the conventions of 'good' writing, regarding fiction instead as giving significant artistic licence. And the "offences" here are second order relative to Eileen (where a crucial gun was introduced with a a blatant Chekhovian nod "I tell you this simply to put the gun into the scenery").

And, to the author's credit, the last few pages of the novel, and particularly the wonderful closing line are very well done.

Overall, if anything reading this gave me greater appreciation for Eileen, but the overreliance on long lists of prescription drugs (some real, some invented) rather spoiled the novel for me.

2.5 stars rounded to 3 as I would read another book by the author despite this one not working for me.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is the follow-up to Ottessa Moshfegh’s Booker shortlisted Eileen. Whereas Eileen was named front and centre, the central character in My Year is unnamed. She is a wealthy young white woman who has a crush on Whoopi Goldberg. Having inherited her parents’ wealth, and having no particular ambition, she just cruises through life. She works at an avant garde gallery in New York just for something to do; she is visited from time to time by her uni friend Reva even though they no longer seem to have much in common. Reva’s father is sick, so Reva is needy. And Reva has to work hard to try to sustain a lifestyle that is only half as good as our narrator. And there’s a philandering boyfriend.

So how does our narrator respond? She sleeps. In fact, she wants to sleep pretty much for a year. Thanks to a psychiatrist of questionable competence, there is a never-ending supply of sleep medication. All she has to do is get the prescriptions dispensed at the local pharmacy, eat a minimum of food and her life will pass.

But one of the drugs allows her to sleepwalk for three days, then wake up with no memory of anything that has happened. There will be signs – photos, empty food containers, outrageous clothes, mail order parcels – that will give some clue, but nothing concrete.

Up to a point this is comical. It is fun to see just how bad the psychiatrist is; just how far our narrator will go to shut down a life that refuses to stop; just how oblivious she can be to the needs and cares of everyone else in the world. But after about half the novel, it gets wearisome. Plus, there’s the Achilles Heel in the structure that rest and relaxation – sleep if you will – leaves nothing to narrate. Therefore, the novel covers only the bits that are not rest and relaxation. It looks at the interstices between sleeps. Thus, the impression is created that the narrator is a bit of a busy bee, always doing something, even if that is the same as she was doing thirty pages earlier, and thirty pages before that.

My Year is genuinely, laugh out loud funny in places. It is certainly worth reading at least half of the novel. Then, at the halfway point, put it down and move onto something else because you’ll already have got the idea.

I thought My Year Of Rest And Relaxation was excellent. I didn’t expect to like it at all and only tried it on the recommendation of a friend, but it turned out to be thoughtful, insightful, very readable and oddly compelling.

The book, set in 2000 and 2001, is narrated by a twenty-something, rich, beautiful New Yorker with no remaining family who can’t engage with anything and decides to try to “reset” her life by being doped-out and preferably asleep for a year, with the help of a wacky, pill-happy psychiatrist. It sounds grim , frankly, but it is so well done that Otessa Moshfegh pulls it off brilliantly and against all my expectations I found it involving, gripping and rather profound. It is very well structured, too, as it heads toward a very striking ending.

It’s a book about what it means to be alive and about the importance of truth and sincerity in a world of self-serving people and the trivialising of deep human experience. Moshfegh sends neat and very well-aimed barbs at the self-obsessed and self-serving of all kinds, and the fatuous superficiality of the world of self-help and pop psychology, for example. It’s all done with a brilliant light touch; never laboured and expressed with a brilliant elegance. The book is packed with unemphasised but profound, insightful phrases like “watching her take what was deep and real and painful and ruin it by expressing it with such trite precision...”, for example, said of a friend who gads from one diet and life-plan to the next in search of “her goals.” There’s also some unvarnished humour, as when the narrator almost accidentally arrives at the funeral of her Jewish friend’s mother: ‘“Is this the sitting thing? You sit for ten days?” I asked, handing her the bouquet of flowers. “Shiva is seven days. But no. My family isn’t religious or anything. They just like to sit around and eat a lot.”’

I would urge you to give this a try even if the description doesn’t sound very appealing. I thought I’d hate it, but it was among the best books I’ve read this year and I can recommend it very warmly.

(My thanks to Vintage for an ARC via NetGalley.)