Is it possible to hibernate your problems away?
Our main character – privileged, vain, and traumatised – chooses to sleep for a year to take a break from her life. In our spiciest review yet, we discuss self-medication, unlikable characters, and one of the worst mental heath professionals we’ve ever encountered in fiction.
Mental health topics covered: Prescription drug use, bad psychiatrists, depression, unhealthy relationships and friendships, privilege, escapism and avoidance, childhood trauma, bulimia nervosa
Additional content warning for 9/11 terrorist attacks.
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About the Book
From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman’s efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes.
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.
About the author
Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Death in Her Hands, her second and third novels, were New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World and a novella, McGlue. She lives in Southern California.
Our Thoughts
We both struggled with this book, due to the characterisation of the unnamed main character and the overarching story arc. The MC is not entirely unsympathetic – she is an interesting example of the impacts of depression, family trauma, and the role of detachment and avoidance. However, we found it difficult to wade through the endless chapters of her cruelty, vanity, and lack of self-awareness. Side characters were either underdeveloped (Reva) or cartoonish (the psychiatrist), and the narrative heavily relies on shock value.
We also struggled with understanding what meaning we should take away from this book, feeling like we learned very little and mostly just felt frustrated. Is the point that there is no point and everyone is terrible? Maybe so, but that’s not why either of us choose to engage with literature.
Discussion Questions
- Does a novel have to involve meaningful character growth for you to feel invested?
- The main character is obviously meant to be written as an unlikable character. How can an author write an unlikable character, but keep readers engaged in the narrative?
- Overall, did the book make you think differently about prescription drug use?
Resources
Our November book club selection is…
Girl in Pieces by Kathleen Glasgow
Charlotte Davis is in pieces. At seventeen she’s already lost more than most people do in a lifetime. But she’s learned how to forget. The broken glass washes away the sorrow until there is nothing but calm. You don’t have to think about your father and the river. Your best friend, who is gone forever. Or your mother, who has nothing left to give you.
Every new scar hardens Charlie’s heart just a little more, yet it still hurts so much. It hurts enough to not care anymore, which is sometimes what has to happen before you can find your way back from the edge.
A deeply moving portrait of a girl in a world that owes her nothing, and has taken so much, and the journey she undergoes to put herself back together. Kathleen Glasgow’s debut is heartbreakingly real and unflinchingly honest. It’s a story you won’t be able to look away from.
Novel Feelings 