"Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness."
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a novel by Otessa Moshfegh, released in 2018.
Set in New York City in 2000-2001 and told in a stream-of-consciousness style, the book follows an unnamed young woman from a wealthy family. Orphaned and recently fired from her art gallery job, the only real connections in her life are her creepy older boyfriend Trevor and her social-climbing college roommate Reva. Dissatisfied with her current life, the young woman has fixated on the idea of sleeping for extended periods of time, which she begins to achieve through the help of a quack psychiatrist, Dr. Tuttle, who is under the impression that the woman is an insomniac and supplies her with a myriad of medications. The novel chronicles the protagonist's attempts to sleep through a whole year, hoping that she will emerge a newer and better person.
Tropes in this novel include:
- 20 Minutes into the Past: Published in 2018, it's set between 2000 and 2001.
- Abusive Parents: The narrator's mother was frigid, joyless, and selfish, and her neglectful parenting was part of what led the narrator to be so bitter and misanthropic.
- Accentuate the Negative: The prevailing tone of the narration is bitter, jaded contempt towards just about everything.
- Age-Gap Romance: Deconstructed.
- The 20-something Reva is The Mistress to her married middle-aged boss Ken, who strings her along and eventually dumps her.
- The narrator met Trevor when she was 19 and he was 33, and it is consistently shown that Trevor takes advantage of her and exploits her when a romance with a woman his own age goes awry.
- Bait-and-Switch: It's repeatedly mentioned that Trevor works in the Twin Towers. However, he survives; he's on vacation when 9/11 happens. Reva, on the other hand, works there by September, and she dies.
- Beauty Breeds Laziness Parodied on a societal level; The narrator is a beautiful, skeletal, blonde Ice Queen who perfectly matches the beauty standards of the 2000s. She has a job at the front desk of an art gallery, but she is intentionally terrible at her job, with a particular fondness for napping in the closet. She eventually gets fired - but notes that she was kept on much longer than she expected because of her beauty.
- Belated Love Epiphany: A non-romantic version. Following a year where she mistreats, ignores, and generally expresses irritation with her, the narrator finally realizes how deeply she cares about Reva after waking up from her sleep. Reva has apparently moved on and brushes her off. They then never get a chance to restore their friendship because Reva dies on 9/11.
- Cloud Cuckoolander: Dr. Tuttle is a deeply eccentric woman, going off on bizarre tangents and forgetting key details of her patient's life during appointments.
- Dogged Nice Girl: Reva is a platonic example. No matter how terrible a friend the narrator is, Reva is always there for her.
- Downer Ending: Right when the protagonist realizes that she does care about Reva, Reva stops caring about her, and then Reva dies during the attack on the World Trade Center. What makes it even sadder is that the last words that Reva's mother gave her was to relax and have fun with her life, only for her to perish within a year.
- Dr. Feelgood: Dr. Tuttle hands out prescriptions like candy, particularly to our narrator. Although she's not unscrupulous, she's generally clueless and gullible, taking all the lies our narrator tells her at face value.
- Dramatic Irony: It's set in New York just before 9/11, and Moshfegh gets plenty of mileage from the tension generated as that day draws closer and closer. She plays this up to eleven with Reva, who not only works at Marsh (which had the second-biggest loss of employees at the Towers) but also is being transferred to... its terrorism risk division.
- Driven to Suicide: The narrator's mother killed herself with pills and alcohol weeks after her husband died of cancer.
- Dude, She's Like in a Coma:
- Trevor evidently gets off to getting blowjobs while the narrator pretends to be asleep. She once wakes up from a blackout in the middle of giving him one.
- Referenced when the protagonist arranges for Ping Xi to attend to her needs while using her as a muse for his next art show while she's blacked out. She isn't concerned he'll do sexual acts with her while she's unaware because she's pretty sure he's gay.
- Eccentric Artist: Ping Xi is a modern artist who does things like paint abstract art with his own ejaculate, or taxidermy dogs and have them shoot lasers out of their eyes in the dark. That said, he's less of a Cloud Cuckoolander and more just pretentious and self-absorbed.
- Everyone Loves Blondes: The protagonist is blonde, which is treated as evidence of her striking beauty — she was popular in high school because she was thin, pretty, rich, and blonde. Trevor mentions that blondes make him feel something that brunettes don't.
- Fictional Fan, Real Celebrity: The narrator is an obsessive fan of Whoopi Goldberg and watches her movies on repeat for seemingly days. She also likes Harrison Ford, though nowhere to the same extent as Whoopi.
- First-Person Smartass: The narrator is a particularlycaustic example.
- Flashback Echo: While at Reva's mother's funeral, the protagonist starts recalling her parents' individual funerals.
- Foil: The narrator and Reva contrast in nearly every way. Reva is from a middle-class Jewish family and wants to rise up in society; the narrator is from an upper-class WASP family and regards her status with apathy. Reva works hard to maintain her appearance; the narrator describes herself as an Unkempt Beauty. Reva has an actual job, while the narrator's wealth allows her to slack off for a year.
- Freudian Excuse: The protagonist's parents were extremely detached, uncaring, and unsupportive, and the narrator, both in flashbacks and in the present day, regularly represses normal emotional feelings about them with the realization that it makes no sense for her to feel them. Even her quandary about possibly selling the family home and losing her last attachment to them ends in her admitting that she has literally no normal childhood memories to be sentimental about.
- Friendless Background: The protagonist has literally no friends besides Reva, and barely tolerates Reva as it is. Her musing on her past reveals that she had no friends in school and never wanted any, and she is comfortable calling herself an Ice Queen.
- Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Played with. Reva, perhaps the most moral character in the novel, gets an abortion after an affair with her boss leaves her pregnant. However, getting the abortion leads to her death: if she kept the baby, she'd have given birth and gone on maternity leave by the time 9/11 happened.
- Heel Realization: When the narrator contemptuously imagines how best she will hurt Reva if Reva tries to end their friendship, she realizes that she doesn't know why she's being so cruel when Reva is so nice to her, especially considering they're on their way to Reva's mother's funeral, while the narrator is wearing said mother's shoes. Unfortunately, she quickly reverts back to her old ways.
- Hollywood Thin: Rava desperately wants to be thinner despite being a size 4 and is jealous of the narrator's thinness (she is significantly thinner than a 4). The narrator is also treated as beautiful by everyone (including herself).
- The Insomniac: Exploited by the Sleepy Depressive protagonist, who pretends to be an unwell insomniac so her quack doctor can supply her with increasingly stronger sleep drugs.
- It's All About Me: Played with. The protagonist certainly has no qualms about being being annoyed that Reva is intruding on her rest with her "shallow" problems such as a dying mother and being in loved with a married man; and she even has the audacity to force a grieving, resisting Reva to go through her dead mother's closet to fetch her clothes for the funeral, just because she's too lazy to walk there herself. However, she also never actually demands anyone pay attention to her or care about her problems, and more than anything seems to want to just be left alone forever.
- Ivy League for Everyone: The protagonist and Reva were roommates at Columbia.
- Jerkass: The narrator is cold, bitter, and contemptuous. Her on-again off-again boyfriend, Trevor, might be even worse.
- Nice to the Waiter: Reva thanks the doorman who works at the protagonist's building complex and calls him by name. Despite living there for years, the narrator realizes that she herself never knew his name.
- No Name Given: The protagonist and both her parents are unnamed.
- No Sympathy: The narrator gives only half-hearted reassurances to Reva, even when her mother dies of cancer or when her boss cuts off their affair after he got her pregnant.Her mother was dying of cancer. That, among many other things, made me not want to see her.
- Pet the Dog: After Reva reveals her mother died as she watches television with the narrator, the latter pulls her blanket over both of their feet. When she bungles her subsequent eulogy for her mother, the narrator gives her a supportive thumbs-up. While both are rather anemic moments in comparison with other examples of the trope, they're surprisingly big moments from the ordinarily selfish protagonist.
- The Plan: The narrator devises a plan to spend a year sleeping for extended periods of time, aided by obscene amounts of sleeping pills, in hopes that she'll wake up with a new lease on life. Improbably, it works.
- Red Herring: Trevor is frequently mentioned to work at the World Trade Center, and the novel takes place from 2000 to 2001. He avoids 9/11 because he was on a honeymoon at the time, but Reva does not and dies in the attack.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: Reva is sweet and enthusiastic; the narrator is cold and distant.
- Role Swap Plot: Reva is very invested in and kind to the depressed and detached narrator, no matter how horribly she's treated. By the end of the story, she's finally had enough, and freezes out the narrator, while the narrator wakes up from her long sleep and decides that she actually wants to be an active best friend to Reva. Then the Downer Ending happens.
- Running Gag:
- Dr. Tuttle consistently forgets that the narrator is orphaned.
- The narrator's strange preoccupation with Whoopi Goldberg.
- The Scourge of God: A very dark interpretation of the ending. The narrator sees someone - who she thinks is Reva - die by jumping/falling from the Towers. Reva herself is only in that position because she transferred after having an affair and abortion by her married boss.
- Sex Signals Death: Reva is transferred due to Sleeping with the Boss. Unfortunately for her, the transfer sent her to the World Trade Center on 9/11.
- Shout-Out: Many films that were big in the '80s, '90s, and 2000s are mentioned, as the protagonist frequently spends time watching films and TV shows in her spare time. She is particularly fond of Harrison Ford and Whoopi Goldberg.
- Sleepwalking: Under the influence of an experimental drug named Infermiterol, the narrator starts performing complex tasks while blacked out, including going to parties and booking spa days. She always wakes up with no memory of what transpired.
- Sleepy Depressive: The protagonist. Unhappy with her life, she has instead fixated on sleeping for long periods of time, which she achieves through complex cocktails of drugs.
- Social Climber: The narrator considers Reva, who is from a middle class family, constantly buying knockoff designer bags, bulimic in an attempt to get skinnier, and transparently covetous of the narrator's privilege, as a distasteful social climber.
- Southern Belle: The protagonist's mother is described as a member of drunken country-club Southern aristocracy, descended from "Mississippi loggers on one side and Louisiana oilmen on the other". She's a darker version of the trope, liking fine and beautiful things but proving selfish and neglectful, if not outright abusive.
- Textual Celebrity Resemblance: The narrator is beautiful and constantly favorably compared to celebrities of the day by herself and by other characters, like Angelina Jolie and Kim Basinger.
- Title Drop: This passage explains the title and what the protagonist hopes to achieve.My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.
- Trademark Favorite Food:
- The narrator always orders two coffees.
- Reva is always mentioned to be consuming sugar-free yogurt.
- Trauma Conga Line: Reva's mother is terminally ill from cancer, and dies on Christmas Day. Then her married boyfriend dumps her after getting her pregnant, she has an abortion, and then dies during 9/11.
- True Art Is Incomprehensible: As a receptionist for a modern art gallery, the narrator is privy to a lot of out-there art, with the aforementioned Ping Xi being just one example. However, contrary to the trope, she regards almost all of it with utter contempt, seeing it as a bunch of meaningless provocations for the wealthy and pretentious to stroke their chins over.
- Turn of the Millennium: The titular year starts in June of 2000 and ends in June of 2001. The book itself strongly evokes New York at the turn of the millennium: VCRs haven't become obsolete just yet, cell phones exist but no one can text, and soon enough, nothing will be the same again.
- Undisclosed Funds: The narrator is a rich White Anglo-Saxon Protestant privy to a sizable inheritance. It's never clarified how much, but she has people to manage her estate while she sleeps, her father paid for an Ivy League education with no problem, has a closet full of designer goods she never wears, and she can afford to live in a well-furnished apartment located in the Upper East Side of Manhattan for years after college despite being either unemployed or getting paid a little over $20,000 a year.
- Unkempt Beauty: Despite not giving a damn about her physical appearance and sleeping for extended periods of time, the narrator describes herself as looking like an off-duty model.
- Unrequited Love Switcheroo: A platonic variant. Once the narrator can finally, sincerely return Reva's affection, Reva has stopped caring about her.
- Weight Woe: Reva is constantly trying to get skinnier despite being a size 4.
