Why My Year of Rest and Relaxation Hits Different When You're Wide Awake

 

There’s something undeniably intriguing about a book with a cult following. You pick it up expecting revelation, maybe discomfort, maybe brilliance—or at least a kind of raw, cynical honesty that sticks. Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation has been praised as all of that and more: daring, darkly funny, a masterclass in literary detachment. But reading it in the wake of my mother’s stroke, as I navigated real-world umheaval and responsibility, what I found wasn’t profound. It was hollow.

And no, I didn’t laugh once.

A Portrait of Privilege in Repose

The premise is simple: a young, attractive, wildly privileged woman in pre-9/11 New York decides to sleep—sometimes quite literally—for a year, numbing herself with a rotating cocktail of pharmaceuticals. Think Snow White without the evils stepmother but a Doctor Tuttle - who'd "been the only psychiatrist to answer the phone at eleven at night on a Tuesday" and who prescibes medicine cabinett fool of psychotropic drugs. And instead of Sneezy, Bashful, Happy and Co. she has a friend called Reva - whom the protagonist loved, but didn't like anymore - "all we had left in common was our history together, a complex circuit of resentment, memory, jealousy, denial, and a few dressed I'd let Reva borrow". She is bored.  And because she has the money, the time, and the absence of accountability, she disappears into hibernation - her word - for a year. 

Some readers find this compelling. I found it utterly alienating. The protagonist isn’t just unlikeable—she’s unreachable. She moves through the world like a ghost of her own design, sneering at everything, feeling almost nothing. She has no interest in growth, no curiosity about others, no awareness of her own privilege. Her apathy isn’t radical. It’s indulgent.

I Stayed Awake—Because I Had No Choice

Reading this novel while showing up, visiting my mother post post-stroke —handling logistics, watching someone you love fight to re-enter their own life— was the wrong moment. It created a tension that never resolved. Where the protagonist checks out, I had to check in. I didn’t have the luxury of numbness - and I didn't actully want it. I much prefered remembering  Call me by your name's ending: 

"How you live your life is your business, just remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. And before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now, there’s sorrow, pain. Don’t kill it and with it the joy you’ve felt.”

The Myth of the "Darkly Funny" Woman

Much has been made of Moshfegh’s deadpan wit and fearless detachment. Critics call the book “darkly funny,” a razor-sharp critique of capitalist burnout and femininity. But I didn’t find it funny—I found offensively privileged, unaware, and unrelatable. There’s nothing inherently brave about indifference. There’s nothing particularly subversive about opting out.

To me, this wasn’t feminism. It wasn’t the recognition of the fundamental conflict between humanity’s search for meaning and the silent, indifferent universe—met not with despair, but with defiant, conscious revolt.  It was a narrative of absence—stylish, perhaps, but hollow. The protagonist's silence says nothing. Her stillness isn't peace—it's stagnation.

The Book You Might Like, If You’re Not Where I Was

Maybe if I’d read this in a different moment, I’d have seen something else. Maybe I’d have admired its minimalism, its bleak elegance. But in the real world, when things fall apart, we don’t get to sleep through it. We don’t get to numb ourselves for twelve months and call it rebirth.

This book didn’t meet me where I was. And that’s okay. But let’s not pretend it’s saying something radical when really, it’s just very quiet.