Book Review: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh

“Satire is meant to ridicule power. If you are laughing at people who are hurting, it’s not satire, it’s bullying.” – Terry Pratchett

Honestly, that sums up my opinions about My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh. It’s a novel about a bully trying to avoid her own emotions through sleeping waaay too much. There were so many insults and generalizations by page 30 that I wasn’t sure if even showing character growth would redeem the book, but there was no character growth until the last few pages, and that was accompanied by such an insulting and trivial allusion to 9/11 that I wondered what editorial team agreed that was okay. You can’t randomly throw in a tragic event over which people are still hurting and reduce it onto one page and into a metaphor of how a woman jumping out of a burning building was alive compared to our depressed protagonist. Do I really have to explain how insulting that is?

Anyways, I realize I jumped to the last pages of the book, so let’s back up. I realize that the protagonist’s nastiness towards other people was supposed to reflect her projecting her own self-hatred, and that she’s supposed to be an unlikeable character. I do like unlikeable characters; one of my favorite books is Crime and Punishment. But there was something so self-important about the way this was written. And honestly, the bullying was so specific, that it felt like the author’s own biases thrown onto a character. Going from Madame Bovary to My Year of Rest and Relaxation was an actually perfect display of how you can write an unbearable character with some insight to offer versus how not to write an unbearable character. 

Also, I really don’t care how beautiful the main character is or how good she still looks after hibernating, downing downers, and not eating. The touches of narcissism just added to my dislike for the protagonist and the novel.

Maybe if I read this when I was still in the throes of depression and sleeping too much, I would relate to it more and like it better. Maybe. But I do want to address a possible misconception: depression does look different on everybody, and it can definitely make you more inconsiderate, more irritable, and more prone to lashing out, because it is definitely a selfish disease, but it doesn’t straight up make you nasty without any self-remonstration. You generally have to be nasty before to be constantly nasty during, particularly outwardly. I think if this novel was genuinely about apathetic depression, I would have liked it more, but it was filled much more with bitter hatred rather than apathy. 

I give this book 2 out of 5 stars because it was actually well-written. Reading about a privileged, vain, rude girl sleeping throughout the entire novel should have been unable-to-get-through boring, but it was a very easy read all the way through.