My Year of Rest and Relaxation

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a novel by the American writer Ottessa Moshfegh, published in 2018 and set in New York in 2000 and 2001.

The narrator is unnamed, in her twenties, and in possession of an Upper East Side apartment, a job at an art gallery that she is about to lose, and a plan. Both her parents died while she was at university, and her response has been to withdraw to a point where she can see no reason to be conscious. She finds Dr. Tuttle, a psychiatrist who writes prescriptions without much interest in the patient, and accumulates a supply of sleeping pills, anti-anxiety drugs and antipsychotics, along with a film she watches on a loop. Her friend Reva, who is bulimic and needy and only partly aware of what is happening, is the one person who keeps turning up. The novel is narrated in a flat, funny voice that describes squalor without complaint, and the reader waits to see whether the plan will work and what will be left if it does.

Moshfegh writes the year as a slow subtraction of things and people, and the book's comedy stays uncomfortably close to its despair.