My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Ratings438
Average rating3.7
A witty look into what depression coupled with privilege might look like. In parts this book reminded me of Catcher in the Rye, which definitely means it has potential to be a new classic.
What a strange story.
The more I think about it, the more I think I liked it, so I'll bump it up a star. It reminds me of something, but I'm not sure what. Maybe Chuck Palahniuk? Sort of?
как и сказано в аннотации это обломов только с антидепрессантами, абсолютно чуждое моей РУССКОЙ душе
другой момент — эту книгу могла бы написать я... но придется посвятить свою жизнь макраме
This book was so boring and so pointless. I hated how depressed and disappointing out character was. It made it seem like the main character hated her life to where she found no point but sleep. Her friend was also a joke and not in any way helpful. Don't even get me started on her therapist who is suppose to be helping her. I really hated the on and off relationship she had with Trevor. I am going to give this book zero stars because I would have hated it even if I finished it.
Contains spoilers
This book is about descending into a dark place and wanting to stay there, needing to stay there. Hibernation, isolation, break-down depression. That said, it's a funny, mean, moving book, that is above all very honest. Maybe it will be more easily understood by those who have experienced depression and can find humor in it. On top of being funny, it's a quick and effortless read.
The main character is a good looking girl who appears to have all the advantages of being blonde, pretty, and from a wealthy family. But inside she is emotionally dead and incredibly isolated. After a series of disappointments leads her to major depression, the main character begins to earnestly seek to spend a year locked away in her apartment asleep as much as possible, floating away on prescription medication and transforming into her future self. Just not yet.
Her best friend is also lost, but copes with in the complete opposite way: frenetic superficial self improvement plans and an obsession with appearances. Best friend dismisses the main character's depression because she envies her beauty. In return, the protagonist treats her friend like crap, a bond of mutual sadomasochistic loneliness.
Her psychiatrist is the unhinged and ready to prescribe Dr. Tuttle, my favorite character. Bless you, Dr. Tuttle. You made me laugh out loud so many times.
I loved many things about this book. The descriptions of disassociation and fugue states. The terrible men. The superficial art world. The frank analysis women have of their own appearances and the treatment it affords them, and the frank discussion of eating disorders. How mean the main best friends were to each-other, and how they tried to love each-other as well. The flashbacks that got us to this point. The way depression makes us brittle and mean. How when you shrink your world down to a tiny stage, the mundane becomes a delight, like your favorite brand of ice cream or the deli coffee from around the corner. The rewatching of Harrison Ford and Whoopie Goldberg videotapes by the protagonist while locked in her depression apartment. When I experienced an episode of major depression, at one point all I could cope with was re-watching various VHSs. It's just so real.
While I enjoyed some of the themes + what I feel was Moshfegh’s initial idea from which this novel was crafted, My Year of Rest and Relaxation falls flat as a whole.
It is five months into the year, and I am finishing my first book of 2024. I have taken an extended vacation from reading. Well, less a vacation, and more a tailspin into sustained but variable crisis, wherein I reserve reading for my visits to the depressive hospitalizations. The manic ones tend to not leave much room for literature. Against the Day and Earthlings were exceptional experiences, I savored both, perfect novels, but upon discharge, I did not re-engage my longstanding love for reading, because life proved consistently to overwhelm. But here I am, sitting in a crisis center, having just finished this book, and about to read Smoke and Mirrors by Gaiman, with my return to University to finish an English Literature degree three years abandoned impending, and I think I have finally struck it, the passion, the fervor, for literature. I am tumbling headlong after a long dormancy, a long but fitful sleep, into embracing words as my future, the future for which I have pined but which I have avoided for two decades. Thank you, Ottessa, for helping me wake up.
A very generous 3.
If the author wanted us to heavily dislike every single character, it was successful.
What the fuck? Like how did I read this entire book... nothing happened but... everything happened. I don't know how I feel yet.
I knew it was accumulating to the twin towers and I knew when she said that Trevor and Reva worked there that 911 had to be an important component of the story. when she starts sleeping consistently blacking out I knew it would be a few months before 911 but the buildup was insane...
Few days later. I feel the same, but more sad for her. I feel like there may have been no absolution for the whole time. Even with the ending.
3.4
Self-indulgent and boring. I was expecting to not mind that if “let me just do nothing and find oblivion as much as possible” was more obviously depression-based. I ended up really frustrated at how terrible the relationships were.
This is it. This is the physical book I want to annotate. I can't, because it's a library book, and I'm honestly kind of devastated.
Anyway, our narrator is incredibly selfish, a horrible friend, and she doesn't care about anyone around her. But she doesn't seem to care about herself either. She's self-destructive and makes no effort to take care of herself in even the simplest of ways. She's not exactly a likeable character, and yet, I found myself liking her. Maybe even loving her. I don't behave the way she does (I promise!) but I somehow understood her. And anyway, her friend Reva did sound kind of annoying.
Though a couple things might not have been 100% believable, the book felt like an incredibly honest memoir, and I enjoyed that aspect a whole lot. I found myself relating to some of the narrator's thoughts and experiences in some abstract, some more concrete ways. She said some things I could have written myself and who knows, maybe that's why I liked her as much as I did.
I love the way My Year of Rest and Relaxation feels like it's about nothing and something at the same time. A young woman sleeps through a year of her life, so, yeah, there's not a lot of action. But sometimes, she wakes up, and in a haze, she goes out for supplies, or to see her irresponsible therapist for prescription refills. She calls her horrible sometimes-boyfriend. Her friend drops by. She reflects on old memories. The between-sleep content provided a surprising amount of substance for a book about a woman who wants a year of nothingness.
I haven't read any other reviews, but I've heard reception was kind of mixed on this book and I understand why, but I'd absolutely recommend it to anyone who doesn't take issue with characters deemed unlikeable.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
The literary equivalent of a TikTok micro-aesthetic...and just about as essential.
At least my depression isn't that bad, of course it's easier to be suicidal when you're rich
Well this book is really somewhat hard to write a properly worded rewiev about. I mean there is just so many thoughts. I can start with the basic stuff.
The therapist, OMG how much I just dislike this therapist. It is just the most horrible and annoying thing ever. How she just does not seem to understand jack shot.I mean she does but it almost seems like she is just totally incompetant in everything she does.
The main caracther I do kinda like. I enjoy her general vibe. She seems relateble and I can easily understand why she does alot of the stuff she does. I am not a fan of how she seems to just be so god damn lazy and just plain out lie her way out of situations. I understand she is struggeling and stuff but the book seems to make it that being ill is an exuse for being a total dick. There is always some sort of understanding but at times this book crosses that line and well so that.
I have to say that leaving the main caracther unamed does give the effect that we can add it almost to everyone we know. It does it give it some sort of effect that makes it feel closer.
In general I did not like this book a lot but it also was not horrble.
Dark, thoughtful and a bit slow to start. Overall proactive and introspective book on mental health and recovery.
Contains spoilers
So-so on this one. A really fun premise and some really yummy awfulness in the first half that kinda flattened out in the second as the author needed to figure out some kind of plot. The narrator's weird psychiatrist Dr. Tuttle is delightful and a highlight of the book. Reva is perfectly drawn as a significant/insignificant side character for the narrator. The semi-comatose trip to Reva's family home was great. I wish some inner (or outer) development in the two major conflicts for the narrator - grieving her troubled relationship with her dead parents, and reconciling her terrible years-long relationship with Trevor - were a larger factor in explaining *why* she is able to come out of her Infermiterol bender in a better place, instead of the thinly-wrought blackout relationship with Ping Xi and then magically being okay selling her parent's house and going outside to watch dogs on a park bench. Dunno, seemed kinda convenient that the first 8 months or whatever saw zero character growth and the last stunt was perfectly successful. I really liked how it was set just-enough before September 11, 2001 that you wondered the whole book if that event would be included or not. Overall it was a pretty fun doomer/goblin-mode read.
This is a one star and a two star and a three star and a four star rating all at once. I can defend each rating but simultaneously think each one is wrong. I'll land in the middle I guess.
One thing's for sure. I don't like it. I might hate it. But damn if I could stop.
I was liking it but then this moment happened.....
so this is absolutely normal that she called someone and lied by saying that she had been sexu*lly assault ?!
maybe, and I truly wish, I didn't understand
It's been a really long time since I've finished a book and had to just sit there holding it and looking out the window like okay... wow, now what?
I generally don't like the overuse of the term “altered my brain chemistry” but right now I can't really find any other words to encompass my reaction to this. I have so much to say and unpack and rave about but I also would like to just hold onto all the information I have on this book and just lie down with it like a comfort blanket and go to sleep.
Given the hype, I was expecting to dislike this.
I didn't.
The protagonist is privileged, inhuman, simultaneously vapid and profound, fake and the realest. A complete basket case.
The writer is incredibly skilled in controlling her naked prose and cut it as close to where it would bleed as possible.
(At one point, she describes the movements of a character's hands as they mimic the box in which their mother's ashes are sitting, unironically, as “voguing”).
The book doesn't really want to teach you anything. And that's okay.
That's honest.
5 out 5 stars. As unethical and slightly painful as it feels to describe this book as “good”, it's impossible not to.