“My Year of Rest and Relaxation” is a 2018 novel written by Ottessa Moshfegh. She is good at telling the stories of deeply troubled women, time and time again. 

Our narrator, nameless throughout the 289-page novel, is a young wealthy thin gorgeous blonde Columbia graduate who is mourning the recent death of her estranged parents. 

In an attempt to become anew, she decides she is going to sleep for a whole year. 

Andy Warhol didn’t have the patience Moshfegh did. His 1964 “Sleep” was a measly 5 hours and 21 minutes. In the way Warhol’s “Sleep” represented anti-film, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” represents anti-plot. I think it is meant to feel just like a dream: time dilated, strange. We start to become the narrator, in a way: yawning and asleep at some parts. However, Moshfegh is hilarious. At many points, I had to close the book and just laugh.

The scoffs turn to admiration, and then maybe hatred as the pages go on. In the face of productivity culture in the United States, the defiance of sleeping for a whole year sounds more seductive than anything. To live without consequences, to dream eternally. How indulgent, how terrible, how perfect. 

On the other hand, our narrator might be the only person who would have the privilege of doing so. She and her best friend, Reva, are the perfectly satirical synecdoches of the real-life depressed 20-somethings with trust funds: not a bill to pay but more than their share of tears to cry.

On the cover, Neoclassical painting “Young Woman in White,” 1798,
by Jacques Louis-David captures this specific suffering: a wealthy white woman’s exhaustion. I can feel the waves of my Sympathy Ocean crashing passionately onto the shore. Can’t you?

More specifically, our CoverGirl is a merveilleuse, or “marvelous one,” a youthful subculture of young women in 18th century France who had survived the Reign of Terror. To cope with their grief, trauma and loss, they began to embrace a “brazen decadence,” says Sebastian Smee, Pulitzer-prize winning art critic. “There is something supremely unreachable about this woman…” We get to meet the Xanax-addicted Upper East Side version 200 years later, thanks to Moshfegh.

The blurb on the back cover sends us on a mission to find out “in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility, what could be so terribly wrong?” We still don’t really know. But it’s something, all right. 

Maybe it’s about leaving and coming back to something anew like a bear in the spring. The cold isn’t as terrible as it used to be, and it feels nice. 

There are one of two things you can get out of this book: a reason to sleep for a year, or a reason to wake up. On that note, sleep well.