My Year of Rest and Relaxation

What's inside (8 sections)

1. A rich girl decides to sleep
2. Reva keeps knocking
3. Dr. Tuttle and the pharmacy drawer
4. Ping Xi and the winter of movies
5. Quitting the art world and waiting
6. Waking up near the end
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I picked this one up after a friend described it as the meanest funny book about depression she had ever read. That stuck with me because I was expecting something heavy and slow, and what I got instead was sharp and rude and weirdly easy to keep reading. The narrator is awful in a way that feels honest. She has money, she has looks, she lives in New York, and she is miserable in a flat, tired way that sleep seems to fix. I finished it in three nights, mostly late, and I kept thinking about Reva the next day more than the narrator.

The basic setup is simple. A young woman in her twenties lives on the Upper East Side in an apartment paid for by family money. Both parents have died recently. She graduated from Columbia with a degree in art history and works at a gallery in Chelsea called Ducat, a job she hates. She has an on and off boyfriend named Trevor who treats her badly. She has one real friend, Reva, who never leaves her alone. In the summer of 2000 she decides she will sleep for a full year. She finds a psychiatrist who will give her almost anything she asks for, stocks up on pills, quits her job, and tries to shut the world out until she can wake up as someone new.

A quick facts note so we stay straight. This is the 2018 novel published by Penguin Press, around 304 pages in the standard hardcover, ISBN 9780525522119. The story itself runs from mid 2000 into 2001, and that timing matters at the end.

What hooked me early was how plain she is about her plan. She does not call it healing. She calls it rest. She wants to sleep through her grief and her boredom and her irritation with everyone. She thinks if she can stay unconscious long enough, her brain will reset. It is a stupid plan and she knows it is stupid, which is part of the humor.

A rich girl decides to sleep

The narrator never gives her name, which fits because she wants to disappear. She is tall and thin and blonde and used to being looked at, and she hates that this is the main thing people value in her. Her father was a professor. Her mother was cold and drank and criticized her. Both are dead by the time the book opens, her father from cancer, her mother soon after, and she inherited enough to live without working if she is careful. She does not feel grateful. She feels numb.

She lives in a nice apartment with good light and high ceilings, and she slowly trashes it with her habits. She orders takeout and leaves the containers. She watches movies on VHS. She drinks coffee to wake up just enough to take more pills to go back down. She keeps lists of drugs and dosages with a kind of student care, trying combinations like an amateur chemist.

Her job at Ducat sharpens the picture. The gallery is run by a woman named Natasha and a man named Ducat, or at least that is how she talks about them, and the work is mostly sitting at a desk, looking thin, and being polite to rich buyers. She hates the artists and the clients and the small talk. A younger assistant named Nat starts to take over her tasks. Instead of fighting for the job, the narrator lets it slip. She calls in sick. She shows up late. She finally quits because staying awake for eight hours to answer phones feels pointless when her real project is sleep.

Trevor is part of why she wants to check out. He is older, works in finance, and treats her like an option. He calls late at night. He comes over for sex and leaves. He criticizes her and then wants her back when she pulls away. She knows he is bad for her and she keeps answering the phone anyway. At one point she gives him a key and then regrets it. Their scenes are short and sour, and they tell you a lot about her self worth. She would rather be used by someone familiar than be alone with her thoughts.

The decision to sleep for a year comes after all this piles up. She does not want therapy in any normal sense. She does not want to talk about her childhood for five years. She wants a shortcut. She reads about sleep and hibernation and decides unconsciousness is maintenance. If bears can do it, why not her.

Reva keeps knocking

Reva is the heart of the book even though the narrator treats her badly. Reva is the narrator's only friend from college, now working a temp office job she hates, living in a cheaper place, obsessed with her looks, her weight, her hair, her clothes. Her mother is dying of cancer in Virginia. Reva copes by drinking too much wine, throwing up after meals, chasing men who do not respect her, and talking nonstop.

Reva visits constantly. She brings gossip from work. She brings magazines. She cries about her mother and about a married older man named Ken who strings her along. She asks about Trevor. She tries to get the narrator to go out, to eat, to care. The narrator finds her exhausting and needy and loud, and she says cruel things about her in her head and sometimes out loud.

And yet Reva is the only person who actually shows up. Trevor only shows up when he wants sex. The gallery people forget her in a week. Dr. Tuttle, the psychiatrist, only shows up for fifteen minute appointments and a check. Reva brings food. Reva cleans a little. Reva sits on the bed while the narrator drifts off and keeps talking even when no one answers.

One scene I kept thinking about is Reva showing up with a big bag and planning to spend the night, painting her nails and talking about diets, while the narrator is half sedated and trying to stay polite. It is funny until it turns sad. Reva knows her mother is dying and she cannot sit alone in her own apartment with that knowledge. The narrator knows Reva's mother is dying and cannot be bothered to stay awake to comfort her. That gap tells you who these people are.

Later, when Reva's mother dies, Reva falls apart in a more serious way. She drinks more. She misses work. She shows up unkempt, which for Reva is a real sign. She wants the narrator to come to the funeral or at least to care in a normal friend way. The narrator stays in bed. She sends a card or makes a call and goes back to sleep. It is one of the moments where the book dares you to keep liking the narrator. I did, but barely, because Moshfegh lets you see the shame under the coldness.

Reva also serves as a mirror. Both women hate their bodies and their lives, but they handle it in opposite ways. Reva tries frantically to fix the outside. New outfits, new hair, new diet, new man. The narrator tries to shut everything off. Neither approach works, and the book does not pretend one is better. Reva at least wants connection. The narrator wants oblivion.

Dr. Tuttle and the pharmacy drawer

Dr. Tuttle might be my favorite awful character in recent fiction. She is a psychiatrist with an office in Midtown, middle aged, distracted, wearing bad wigs, eating during sessions, half listening while she writes prescriptions. The narrator finds her through some referral and quickly learns the trick. If you describe symptoms in the right order and ask for specific drugs by name, Dr. Tuttle will agree.

Their sessions are short and comic. The narrator complains of insomnia and fatigue and grief. Dr. Tuttle nods and suggests samples. The narrator asks for stronger stuff. Dr. Tuttle warns vaguely about side effects and then writes the script anyway. At one point the narrator is taking a stack of different pills, some to sleep, some to calm down, some to wake up enough to eat, and Dr. Tuttle keeps adding to the pile.

The narrator keeps the drugs sorted in a drawer and on the kitchen counter. There is trazodone and Ambien and Klonopin and other names readers will recognize. Then Dr. Tuttle mentions a fictional drug called Infermiterol, a powerful sedative that is supposed to induce a kind of blackout sleep for days at a time, with weird side effects. The narrator latches onto it as the answer. If she can get enough Infermiterol, she can really stay under.

What makes these chapters work is that Moshfegh never lets it feel like a medical drama. It feels like a scam both women agree to. Dr. Tuttle gets paid and gets to feel helpful without doing much. The narrator gets chemicals and gets to avoid honesty. Neither asks hard questions. When the narrator reports blackouts, lost time, strange behavior, Dr. Tuttle treats it as progress.

I laughed a lot here, and then felt uneasy. Anyone who has dealt with overprescribing or pill swapping will recognize the pattern. The book pushes it to an extreme, but the core feels true. Grief plus money plus access plus a careless doctor is a bad mix. The narrator is lucky she does not die, and Moshfegh knows it. She keeps the tone light while showing a woman slowly poisoning herself on purpose.

A fair criticism is that Dr. Tuttle can feel like a cartoon after a while. She is so negligent, so clueless, that you start to wonder how she keeps a license. I think that is intentional satire about cash pay psychiatry in New York around 2000, but if you want realism, these scenes will annoy you. I accepted her as a comic device, like a bad fairy godmother handing out bottles instead of wishes.

Ping Xi and the winter of movies

About halfway through, the narrator adds a stranger to her hibernation plan. Ping Xi is a young artist who lives in Brooklyn and makes conceptual art about endurance and control. Through a friend of a friend, or through gallery contacts, she meets him and proposes a deal. She will lock herself in her apartment for months and let him bring her food and basic supplies, document her sleep, and later show the project as art. He agrees because he wants a big piece for his career.

Ping Xi is exact and bossy in a way that suits her. He brings bland food. He sets rules. He takes photos. He leaves notes. He does not try to be her friend. For a while this arrangement helps her sleep more deeply because she does not have to shop or deal with the outside world. She can take the Infermiterol in larger doses and stay under for days, waking only when Ping Xi knocks or lets himself in with a key to check that she is alive.

While she is awake in short bursts, she watches the same movies over and over. Whoopi Goldberg comedies, Harrison Ford thrillers, old favorites she can half follow while drugged. She likes Whoopi in particular because the humor is warm without asking anything of her. She orders the same takeout. She drinks bodega coffee to jolt herself awake enough to shower, then takes pills to sink again.

Her apartment decays in a way that feels honest. Trash piles up. Laundry piles up. The freezer fills with weird leftovers. She loses track of days. She wakes with dry mouth and sore limbs and a fogged brain and tells herself this is healing. Sometimes she sleepwalks or does odd things she only learns about later from notes or missing items, like calling Trevor or emailing Reva nonsense.

The Ping Xi sections also show how thin the line is between art and exploitation. He is using her. She is using him. Neither cares much about the other as a person. When he pushes her to stay locked in longer, or films her sleeping without real consent, it feels creepy. When she uses his deliveries to avoid any human contact, it feels sad. Moshfegh does not resolve this. She lets it sit as another New York transaction.

Winter in the book feels endless. Snow, gray light, radiators clanking. Reva still visits, though less often, bringing stories about Ken and work and her mother's decline. Trevor calls and sometimes stops by, confused by the locked door and the strange man bringing groceries. The narrator drifts. Time blurs. That blur is the point, and Moshfegh writes it well without making it boring, mostly because the sentences stay sharp even when the narrator is dull with drugs.

Quitting the art world and waiting

One of the stronger threads is how much the narrator hates the art world that educated her. She studied art history at Columbia, learned to talk about painting with the right terms, got a gallery job that should have been a step up. Instead she found it fake and exhausting. Rich people buying status. Artists performing suffering. Assistants performing cheer.

She tells stories about openings where everyone drinks cheap wine and pretends to see meaning in blank canvases. She describes clients who want art to match their sofa. She describes coworkers who compete over who is thinnest and most tired. Quitting feels like relief, but also like proof she cannot function. Without the job, days lose shape. Without shape, sleep takes over completely.

Her money matters here. She can do this year of sleep only because she does not need to work. Rent is covered. Bills are covered. She has no kids, no partner who needs her, no parent left to care for. Moshfegh is clear that this is a privileged breakdown. Reva cannot afford to sleep for a year. Reva has to show up to temp jobs with a hangover and a fake smile while her mother dies. The narrator knows this and feels both guilty and superior, which is an ugly mix she does not try to hide.

Waiting becomes the main action. She waits for pills to kick in. She waits for Ping Xi to bring food. She waits for Reva to leave so she can go back to bed. She waits for Trevor to stop calling. She waits for spring. The book risks dullness here, and for about fifty pages in the middle I felt the drag. Same cycle, same movies, same complaints. I think some of that repetition is deliberate, to make you feel drugged time, but it still tests patience.

What keeps it moving is the voice. She notices things even half asleep. The smell of trash in the hall. The sound of Reva crying in the bathroom. The way Trevor smells of cologne and cold air. The way Dr. Tuttle's wig slips. The sentences are clean and funny, even when nothing happens. I underlined a lot of small observations about New York apartments, about being a young woman alone, about how grief makes you selfish.

She also starts to have stranger gaps. She wakes with food missing. She finds notes she does not remember writing. She loses her keys and finds them in the fridge. Infermiterol is doing something to her memory. Dr. Tuttle says this is normal. Ping Xi says this is interesting for the project. Reva says she looks terrible. Trevor says she is crazy. All of them are right in part.

Waking up near the end

As spring turns to summer in 2001, the narrator tries to come back. She reduces the doses, or runs out, or decides the year is almost done. The exact mechanics are hazy on purpose because she is an unreliable reporter of her own drug use. She starts staying awake longer. She cleans the apartment a little. She sees Reva with clearer eyes and feels embarrassed at how she treated her.

Ping Xi finishes his part and moves on. Trevor fades, or she finally stops answering. Dr. Tuttle keeps prescribing, but the narrator visits less. She starts walking outside more, noticing the city heat, the crowds, the ordinary noise she blocked for months. She feels raw and thin skinned, like someone after a long illness, unsure if she is better or just different.

Reva's arc closes in a painful way. I will not spoil every beat, but Reva makes a choice about her career and her appearance that the narrator sees as shallow and Reva sees as survival. They have a last long visit that is both tender and cruel. The narrator finally listens for a while. Reva finally says some true things about being the friend who always tries harder. It is the closest the book gets to warmth, and Moshfegh does not oversell it.

The ending lands near September 2001 in New York. The narrator is awake, living a smaller life, watching the city from her window and on the street. Without giving away the final image, she witnesses the shift that everyone who lived through that fall remembers, when ordinary life broke open. For a book about wanting to sleep through history, ending awake in history feels right. She wanted to miss everything. She ends up present for something huge and terrible.

Did the year work. The book refuses a clean answer. She is not magically cured. She is not a better person. She is thinner, stranger, still prone to contempt. But she is awake. She can stand being conscious for a full day without pills. She can look at Reva without pure irritation. That counts as progress in this world.

My fair criticism is this. The middle sags, Dr. Tuttle stretches belief, and the narrator's cruelty toward Reva, especially about weight and looks, can feel repetitive and cheap. Some readers will also hate that wealth makes the whole experiment possible while Reva suffers without a safety net, and the book does not apologize for that. I think that anger is part of the point, a satire of a certain Upper East Side sadness, but it will put some people off. The casual drug use, vomiting, and self harm talk also need a warning. This is not a cozy book.

Who should read it. If you like sharp, funny, uncomfortable narrators and books about grief that refuse to be sweet, try it. If you liked books about aimless young women in cities, or art world satire, or dark humor about pills and bad boyfriends, you will find a lot here. If you need likable leads or a clear moral, skip it. I liked it more than I expected, mostly for Reva and for the sentences, and I still felt a little gross after, which I think Moshfegh wanted.

FAQ

Does the book end around September 2001?

No, though the final pages land near September 2001 in New York. The narrator starts her sleep plan in mid 2000 and wakes to a city changed by a huge public event.

What is Infermiterol?

It is a made-up strong sedative in the story that Dr. Tuttle prescribes. The narrator seeks it because it keeps her under for days at a time with blackouts and lost time.

Who should read it and who should skip it?

Readers who like sharp, funny, uncomfortable narrators and art world satire may like it. Readers who need likable leads, clear morals, or light handling of pills and grief should skip it.