My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh| Published July 12th 2018 by Jonathan Cape | 304 Pages | Goodreads
✅ PUBLISHER’S DESCRIPTION
“A shocking, hilarious and strangely tender novel about a young woman’s experiment in narcotic hibernation, aided and abetted by one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature. Our narrator has many of the advantages of life, on the surface. Young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents in college, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?
This story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs, designed to heal us from our alienation from this world, shows us how reasonable, even necessary, that alienation sometimes is. Blackly funny, both merciless and compassionate – dangling its legs over the ledge of 9/11 – this novel is a showcase for the gifts of one of America’s major young writers working at the height of her powers”
✅ REVIEW
It’s the year 2000. Our main character is a young and beautiful woman who has had her share of disappointments in life and decides to spend most of her time sleeping and watching movies on her VHS.
To achieve this, she starts visiting a psychiatrist she found on the yellow pages. This terrible doctor provides her with all the prescription narcotics she wants, and she begins to consume medications like an unsupervised kid eating halloween candy. Oh, and she doesn’t has to worry about money, she’s set in that respect.
As the novel progresses, we learn about the main character’s background, relationships, and the events that led her to this point. The novel is at points absurd, and at other points, cynical and sad. How does this end? You have to read to find out.
Overall, I liked the novel and recommend it to readers of contemporary fiction.
✅ BOOK SOURCE AND FORMAT
Loan from Miami-Dade’s Library Overdrive, audiobook
This sounds interesting and, sadly, like a few too many middle-aged women that I know.
I have seen this book in my library. I will have to pick it up and give it a go. Nice review!
Thank you! I listened to the library audiobook, it had a good narrator
Hmmm. This book was on more best of lists in 2018 than any other. I’d hoped to get to it sometime this year, but I just don’t know. Still seems kind of iffy to me. :/
Myndi, I liked it but didn’t love it. There, I’ll leave the rest up to you 😊