My Year of Rest and Relaxation [review]

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My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
Published by Penguin Press on July 10, 2018
my rating: 3 stars
Goodreads avg: 3.73 (as of 2022-03-22)
Spoiler-free review

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Life was fragile and fleeting and one had to be cautious, sure, but I would risk death if it meant I could sleep all day and become a whole new person.

This had been recommended to me by my friend Libby for the 12 in 12 Challenge, but it had been on my TBR since 2018 and I was looking forward to reading it. Friends of mine had very much enjoyed it and I thought the concept was interesting: the narrator decides that she wants to sleep for an entire year. So she does. Or she tries, at least. Using a cocktail of downers, she sleeps as much as possible.

I enjoyed the writing in this at a technical level, but I was just never as invested as I wanted to be. It felt like a bit of a slog, and I found myself not wanting to pick it back up except to finish it so I could move on to something else. Perhaps part of this is Moshfegh’s extremely real portrayal of depression. Real depression can be real hard to read, as it digs into your brain and pulls you down with it.

The narrator is incredibly unlikeable, something that is never a dealbreaker for me in a book since I love reading about messy women. Basically I’m that meme that’s like “I support women’s rights. But I also support women’s wrongs.” And this woman has a lot of wrongs. Unfortunately I just didn’t find them interesting in the way I normally do. I was bored by her poor relationships and her cold facade.

The end, though, that end was a punch in the gut. It pulled things together for me in a way I wasn’t quite expecting. Although I don’t fully understand what Moshfegh was doing here, I do appreciate the novel she gave us and I am intrigued enough to give her other works a try.

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