My Year of Rest and Relaxation is the second novel by millennial literary phenomenon Ottessa Moshfegh. Image: Penguin Books / Supplied

My year of… Restlessness and anxiety?

My year of rest and relaxation is the second novel by millennial literary phenomenon Ottessa Moshfegh. Her other works gently expose and separate the same themes: feelings of deep loneliness and seemingly incurable, usually from a female perspective. Her works feature women in incredibly unique situations, yet somehow manage to make them accessible and universally applicable. My year of rest and Relaxation was shortlisted for the Man Booker Award, making a huge splash in the literary world in 2018. None of this explains the gigantic online obsession he has built up over the past six months (we can probably thank BookTok for that).

In short, My year of rest and relaxation is an early 2000s work of historical fiction that focuses on an unnamed Columbia art history graduate in his 20s living and working in a thriving post-Y2k New York City. She has it all: a great job in an art gallery, a paid apartment, social and cultural capital because of its richness and beauty. Despite all of this, she is depressed. She struggles to cope with the death of her parents, something she didn’t recognize (and she’ll spend the whole book working on it). His only escape from the winding ease and banality are the Whoopi Goldberg movies on VHS and deep, dreamless sleep. She sleeps during her lunch breaks at the art gallery and gets fired for it. Realizing that her natural circadian rhythm doesn’t allow her to get enough sleep, she visits a quack to be prescribed various pills that will cause her body to shut down against her will. His increasingly disturbing visits to his psychiatrist with a loose screw result in prescriptions piling up on prescriptions. Not since the doctor of Requiem for a dream Has there been a more incompetent doctor. The book focuses on his increasingly extreme and complicated attempts to spend as much time as possible asleep. She opts for a year of sleep: it is the eponymous year of rest and relaxation, which she describes as “having saved her life”.

Her social network is stripped down, consisting of her self-taught corporate friend Reva, a size four (six if puffy) gym rat dress jealous of our narrator in every way. Her two male companions are her fuck buddies (precariously male Wall Street asshole Trevor) and an ambiguous romantic interest (modern artist Ping Xi). The narrator does not care about any of these people – they are just secondary characters in his story. The world revolves around her, and everyone is just white noise at the edges of her story.

Even the coldest, most cynical person grits their teeth empathetically at some of our main character’s sour internal monologues. In a particularly difficult scene, she enters her friend Reva’s apartment and cruelly tears it apart. Reva is struggling with bulimia, a medical condition that our protagonist does not see as a serious disorder but as a moral flaw. This constant criticism of Reva never really falters: she criticizes her for the way she drinks tequila and mountain dew, for her sartorial sense, for her bodily insecurities and eating disorders, for her obsessive exercise. Reva is the only person who comes to visit the narrator during her depressive sleep episodes, but the narrator still acts annoyingly, pushing her away. This toxic friend dynamic changes in the third act, but leaves us wondering if it’s not too late. Without spoiling the end, everything is resolved and neatly packaged, for better or for worse. The book ends with such genius that it is almost frustrating. (And for the record, I cried.)

My year the unnamed protagonist is not likable – a move that I think is deliberate. We sympathize with her: we do not sympathize. She has just enough unpleasant features to make us love and hate us at the same time. When his Columbia sisterhood sisters are cold and callous after the death of his parents, we feel bad. In a way, as the reader, we are the sisters of the sorority: we feel bad, but we also gloat a bit about their struggle. Finally, she has her ankle spilled. But we soon feel worse and worse, as volatile family dynamics and our protagonist’s story are slowly unveiled throughout the novel via ominous waking nightmares and breakdowns.

Why has the book become so popular now? To make a reach, it’s the combination of the escape in the novel and our societal escape in everything but our current reality. It’s like there’s a meta-escape: dozens of readers want to escape To the world the narrator tries to escape of. I really can’t disagree with them: who wouldn’t want to be a hot blonde trust baby working in a trendy art gallery in New York City? But to think about it is to completely miss the point. The book is an uplifting account of emotional and temporal dissatisfaction with a materially satisfied life. In several cases, the narrator admits to not even liking designer clothes; she just did what was expected of her. In a flashback, one of her college professors laughs at her Miu Miu boots, and she doesn’t think about it. She just kept buying designer boots. It is only when she experiences her prolonged drug-induced disorder that she begins to question her purchasing choices. Who said the life without a test isn’t worth living?

All of these complex and vaguely anti-capitalist messages have spiked Twitter popularity this summer. I saw whispers on literary Twitter in the spring, with a few YouTube reviews popping up. In June, he had entered other Twitter spheres, the various esoteric communities of which I am a part, absolutely eating him. These are not communities known for their literary knowledge, mind you. The book has become a mere symbol of itself, a pale distorted portrayal of pubescent girls reading it, missing the essentials and unabashedly admiring the narrator’s rich WASP past, her upbringing at Columbia, her beauty, her care. – designer dress. The painting on the cover has become inextricably associated with the book itself. This idealization ignores the deep void the narrator feels, her deep sense of apathy, her exhaustion in the face of the boring excesses of New York’s high culture. Of course, there is no such thing as a “wrong” way to interpret art, and most memes are self-critical and referential in a typical 2021 fashion. This has generated a wave of memes and edits centered around pretty girls holding books. My year of rest and relaxation has made its way into the canon of pretty girl literature alongside Virgin Suicides, Lolita, and The secret story.

Memes spread most easily on Instagram, an all-visual medium with a user base that is the book’s target audience. The exhaustion of the narrator is something almost universal. Don’t we all want to detach ourselves a little from society? Not worrying about money, work, friends and family? Aren’t we all exhausted? The book’s sudden popularity can reasonably be attributed to the climate of self-care that emerged alongside the coronavirus pandemic: a year of rest and relaxation was sort of what we were promised. When COVID extended beyond that first month, it became clear that we would be spending an indefinite period inside our homes. It quickly became an unattainable goal. The stress of online school for students, the constant flow of emails and zoom meetings for employees, continuous work and long hours for members of the service industry, who never have had a break. On top of all this, there is the constant pressure from social media to be productive. Your Instagram crawl page is constantly asking you what you accomplished during the blocks. Have you written a book? Have you lost weight? Have you established multiple streams of income? No! I just wanted to fucking relax!

The book is awesome, I read both Death in his hands and McGlue, and it was by far my favorite Moshfegh work – but the hype surrounding it is inseparable from the content or quality of the book itself. This is not a new book, so most of the bookstores I called did not have it in stock, instead his more recent book, Death in his hands. I finally got a special order, the hype got over me. I necessary to own it. It sits on my shelf at home, proudly declaring me an active participant in the social media hype. I recommend that you participate too.