My Year of Rest and Relaxation is Ottessa Moshfegh’s much-anticipated 2018 follow-up to her debut novel, Eileen. Eileen received rave reviews, won the author a coveted Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation follows the life of a wealthy and grieving young woman who decides to sleep for a year with the aid of pharmaceuticals. Despite her attempts not to leave the apartment, she begins to go out at night after she has heavily drugged herself. Aspects of My Year of Rest and Relaxation echo Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. While the plot is strange, Moshfegh's novel earnestly deals with the subjects of grief and healing.
Moshfegh had originally planned to write her sophomore novel about the attacks on September 11, 2001. As the novel evolved, things turned out quite differently. Moshfegh decided to shift the focus of the story from the 2001 attacks, instead positioning September 11th as a punctuating event that ends the narrative. The story ends with the tight focus of a camera lens on a single event which occurred that day. Moshfegh's novel resonantes with the works of such notable writers as Don DeLillo, Art Spiegelman, and Joyce Carol Oates as authors who published writing about September 11th.
Ultimately, My Year of Rest and Relaxation met with more criticism than Eileen. The reviews were mixed. The success of the narrative depends deeply on how a reader responds to the storytelling ability of the narrator. Both lovers and haters come together in agreement upon one essential fact: what is important here is not the story its narrator tells, but rather the telling of the story itself.
