Rating: 2/5

Going into My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh,  I had virtually no idea what the book would be about, just that it was popular amongst the girls who prefer the main characters of their books to be unsettling and absolutely unhinged. Often named alongside the likes of The Virgin Suicides and The Bell Jar, I understood that the book would likely revolve around a (somewhat) mentally unstable girl delving into a trauma or quarter-life crisis of sorts.

In the first chapter, we are introduced to our protagonist, a young, wealthy blonde freshly graduated from Columbia University. Though on the surface she has everything—looks, a promising career, an inheritance—she finds herself utterly unfulfilled in all aspects of life, wishing to cut out the noise and lapse into an eternal sleep. Besides a tumultuous friendship twinged with jealousy and false authenticity, she is often plagued with memories of her deceased parents, who failed to show her love in childhood. She ultimately decides to use all measures necessary to undergo a year of drug-induced slumber, believing she’ll go through a process of ‘metamorphosis’ and be born again with the capacity to feel happy again.

Overall, this book was as crude and satirical as advertised, but in a way that makes it difficult to get through. Moshfegh had indeed intended for the protagonist to be far from perfect, but this book begs the question of whether or not the story itself is interesting enough outside of the shock value the character delivers. It’s confusing in the sense that there are flashbacks to the character’s isolating childhood that were likely written to evoke some level of empathy for the protagonist, but she’s such a terrible person that it’s hard to sympathize with her past, purely because of her lack of character development throughout the book. Beyond a catalog of drugs she takes and creative ways of slandering the people in her life, there was no true ‘plot’ of the story. It’s a recurring cycle that’s interesting at first, but not so much by the third or fourth time. Despite all of this, the book did have a few funny moments and was stylistically written well. Unfortunately, I had high hopes for this book, but it fell flatter than I expected. I’d say, if you’re looking for any way to boost your moral self-esteem, this might just be the book for you. Otherwise, proceed with caution.