My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

Published 2018 · 221 pages · 69,469 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction

How hard is My Year of Rest and Relaxation to read?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation scores 66 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 50 out of 100
The novel employs a contemporary, educated vocabulary, occasionally incorporating specialized terms related to pharmaceuticals (e.g., "trazodone," "Nembutal," "Infermiterol") and art (e.g., "avant-garde," "taxidermied"). While generally accessible, these specific terms and the narrator's reflective language elevate it slightly above common fiction.
Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
Sentences vary in length, with many direct declarations interspersed with longer, more complex structures that feature multiple clauses and internal asides, particularly during the protagonist's extensive internal monologues. This creates a flowing, introspective prose that is more demanding than straightforward commercial fiction but avoids extreme hypotaxis.
Abstraction: 70 out of 100
The entire narrative is built around the protagonist's abstract, philosophical experiment of escaping reality through a year of sleep, constantly reflecting on themes of existence, identity, and the futility of human connection. While grounded in mundane actions, the core content and the narrator's internal world are highly theoretical.
Information density: 55 out of 100
The novel maintains a moderate information density, focusing primarily on the protagonist's internal state, her limited interactions, and repetitive daily rituals. While the internal world is rich, the external narrative and plot progression are not densely packed with multiple storylines or intricate details.
Narrative indirection: 60 out of 100
The narrator explicitly states her intentions and feelings, even when they are contradictory or self-destructive. However, the reader must infer the true depth of her trauma and the psychological mechanisms driving her extreme behavior, particularly during her drug-induced blackouts where her actions are unknown even to herself.
Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
The novel is rich with recurring motifs and symbols, including sleep as a metaphor for rebirth, Whoopi Goldberg as an avatar of absurdity and comfort, and the white fox representing emotional imperviousness. The narrator often explicitly interprets these symbols, guiding the reader toward their deeper meanings.
Ironic distance: 80 out of 100
The novel is steeped in ironic distance, as the narrator describes her extreme self-neglect and drug abuse with a detached, often darkly humorous, and self-aware tone. The central premise of 'rest and relaxation' is a profound irony, contrasting her stated goal of self-preservation with the chaotic and destructive reality of her actions.
Resolution withholding: 85 out of 100
The narrative defers emotional processing and closure throughout, culminating in an ambiguous ending that withholds any clear resolution to the narrator's self-destructive quest. Whether her hibernation project succeeds as transformation or merely as avoidance remains genuinely open.
Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
The narrative primarily follows a linear, first-person perspective, covering a specific period from June 2000 to January 2001. It incorporates frequent, clearly marked flashbacks to the narrator's childhood and college years. The main structural complexity arises from the narrator's drug-induced blackouts, which create significant gaps in her memory.

How My Year of Rest and Relaxation is regarded

My Year of Rest and Relaxation holds a literary regard score of 55 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where My Year of Rest and Relaxation sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (133 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, My Year of Rest and Relaxation scores 88 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to save my life.
Symbol: Formal
A lot of camel-hair coats and black leather briefcases. Burberry scarves and pearl earrings.
Mythos: Irony and Satire iv (irony iv)
The memory should have rustled up some grief in me. It should have reignited the coals of woe. But it didn’t.
Genre: Confession + Novel
I CAN’T POINT TO any one event that resulted in my decision to go into hibernation.

Where the story of My Year of Rest and Relaxation takes place

  • Upper East Side Manhattan, June 2000 to September 2001 (2000 to 2001), the main setting
  • Upstate childhood home, Columbia and the sorority years (1973 to 1996)
  • Farmingdale, Long Island: Reva's mother's funeral, Dec 31, 2000 (2000 to 2001)

5 things that are true of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, with the passage for each

  1. The narrator began her 'hibernation' in mid-June 2000, aged twenty-six.

    I had started “hibernating” as best I could in mid-June of 2000. I was twenty-six years old.

  2. The narrator found her psychiatrist by looking in the phone book.

    She wasn’t a good doctor. I had found her name in the phone book.

  3. She leaves her job by defecating on the gallery floor and stuffing the soiled tissue into a stuffed poodle's mouth.

    Then I pulled down my pants, squatted, and shat on the floor.

  4. Her lock-in plan involves only forty conscious hours in 120 days.

    for the next four months, 120 days total, I would spend only forty hours in a conscious state.

  5. The novel ends on September 11, 2001, with the narrator rewatching a taped image of a woman who jumped from the North Tower.

    Each time I see the woman leap off the Seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower

Scenes in My Year of Rest and Relaxation that Frye would name

40 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Katabasis, untitled
tumbling like Alice down the rabbit hole or like Elsa Schneider disappearing down into the infinite abyss in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. A literal descent into the dark during the final Infermiterol sleep.
Katabasis, untitled
But now I was approaching the mouth of the cave. She frames the forty Infermiterol sleeps as entry into an underworld.
Pathos, untitled
“I hope this was all worth it,” he replied. The father's deathbed, with the mother drinking in the kitchen and the narrator unable to grieve.
Pathos, untitled
My mother’s body stayed alive for exactly three days. The mother's brain-dead death and the withdrawal of life support.
Alazon, untitled
regular Infermiterol use can activate a profound tectonic displacement Dr. Tuttle's pseudo-expertise and invented authority.
Alazon, untitled
“I’ve just been certified as a shaman, or sha-woman, if you please,” The psychiatrist's fraudulent self-presentation reaches its peak.

Books that share these scenes with My Year of Rest and Relaxation

About the author

Ottessa Moshfegh