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My Year of Rest and Relaxation

A Novel

Author Ottessa Moshfegh

Paperback

$18.00 US

Penguin Adult HC/TR | Penguin Books

5.01"W x 7.66"H x 0.8"D | 8 oz | 24 per carton

On sale Jun 25, 2019 | 304 Pages | 978-0-525-52213-3

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Fiction > General Fiction

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time, NPR, Amazon,Vice, Bustle, The New York Times, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Entertainment Weekly, The AV Club, & Audible

A New York Times Bestseller

“One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years: a loopy, quietly furious pillhead whose Ambien ramblings and Xanaxed b*tcheries somehow wend their way through sad and funny and strange toward something genuinely profound.” — Entertainment Weekly

“Darkly hilarious . . . [Moshfegh’s] the kind of provocateur who makes you laugh out loud while drawing blood.” —Vogue

From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes.

Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.

“I don't think I'm ever going to get over Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation.” —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

“Ottessa Moshfegh is easily the most interesting contemporary American writer on the subject of being alive when being alive feels terrible. She has a freaky and pure way of accessing existential alienation, as if her mind were tapped directly into the sap of some gnarled, secret tree. . . . Watching Moshfegh turn her withering attention to the gleaming absurdities of pre-9/11 New York City, an environment where everyone except the narrator seems beset with delusional optimism, horrifically carefree, feels like eating bright, slick candy—candy that might also poison you.” —Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

“Darkly comic and ultimately profound new novel. . . . Moshfegh’s extraordinary prose soars as it captures her character’s re-engagement.” —Vendela Vida, New York Times Book Review

“Because this is a novel by the superabundantly talented Moshfegh—she’s an American writer of Croatian and Iranian descent—we know in advance that it will be cool, strange, aloof and disciplined. The sentences will be snipped as if the writer has an extra row of teeth. . . . Moshfegh writes with so much misanthropic aplomb, however, that she is always a deep pleasure to read. She has a sleepless eye and dispenses observations as if from a toxic eyedropper. . . . Though this novel is set nearly 20 years ago, it feels current. The thought of sleeping through this particular moment in the world’s history has appeal.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Just finished My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh: caustic, funny, dark addition to the lineage of unlikeable female protagonists (by Mona Awad, Sheila Heti, Anita Brookner, Jean Rhys, Emily Bronte . . . + grandmamas Lady MacBeth + Medea)" —Margaret Atwood via Twitter

“The bravado in Moshfegh’s comprehensive darkness makes her novels both very funny and weirdly exhilarating. . . . As in Eileen, Moshfegh excels here at setting up an immediately intriguing character and situation, then amplifying the freakishness to the point that some rupture feels inevitable. Her confidence never flags; hers are the novels of a writer invigoratingly immune to uncertainty and self-doubt.” —Slate

“One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years: a loopy, quietly furious pillhead whose Ambien ramblings and Xanaxed bitcheries somehow wend their way through sad and funny and strange toward something genuinely profound.” —Entertainment Weekly, Best Books of 2018

“A strange, exhilarating triumph. . . . Moshfegh writes with a singular wit and clarity that, on its own, would be more than enough. (Her 2015 debut, Eileen, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Rest has already been optioned for film by Australian actress Margot Robbie). But the cumulative power of her narrative—and the sharp turn she takes in its last 30 pages—becomes nothing less than a revelation: sad, funny, astonishing, and unforgettable.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Moshfegh’s tale of self-care gone off the rails is a caustically funny skewering of artistic pretension and consumption, but also a meditation on grief, privilege and social cohesion.” —Huffington Post

“The most exciting book of 2018 is about a girl sleeping for a year. . . . Ingenious, darkly comedic. . . . The novel speeds to the best last page of any book I’ve likely ever read.” —Vice

“This book isn’t just buzzy and maniacally entertaining—it’s a mean-spirited, tenderhearted masterpiece.” —New York Post

“My Year of Rest and Relaxation is the most poignant, vulnerable, mature, and—dare I say it?—sincere work that its gifted author has yet produced.” —Boston Globe

“In flat, deadpan, unembellished prose recalling the cadences of Joan Didion and the clear-eyed candor of Mary Gaitskill, Moshfegh portrays the vacuous interior life (she has virtually no exterior life) of a narcissistic personality simultaneously self-loathing and self-displaying. . . . My Year of Rest and Relaxation is most convincing as an urbane dark comedy, sharp-eyed satire leavened by passages of morbid sobriety, as in a perverse fusion of Sex and the City and Requiem for a Dream.” —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

“Bizarrely fascinating. . . . Moshfegh knows how to spin perversity and provocation into fascination, and bleakness into surprising tenderness.” —NPR

“It’s another acerbic character study from an author making a career out of bringing absurdly unlikable people to life. No one can discomfit a reader quite like her.” —AV Club

“One of the pleasures of reading Ottessa Moshfegh is that—unusually, these days—she rarely writes in the present tense. Instead, the sense of immediacy, the sense of being inside a character, the sense of things happening and having psychic value, both to the writer and her reader, is provided by the structure and content of her sentences. . . . One of the other pleasures of reading Moshfegh is her relentless savagery. All this is delivered as comic—it is comic—but it’s not exactly funny, though of course we laugh.” —Guardian

“Darkly hilarious . . . [Moshfegh’s] the kind of provocateur who makes you laugh out loud while drawing blood.” —Vogue

“Electrifying. . . a reminder that there is something to life outside the economic exchange of time for money and money for goods, even if that unnamed thing is obscure and perplexing and just a bit monstrous—particularly as a woman. Literature may not have the all the answers, but it can show us the power and allure of saying no.” —Vanity Fair

“I was cringing during every moment of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and yet I could not put the book down. . . . It is mostly, almost by juxtaposition, about the realness of a more subtle and very private expression of pain, no matter the cause, no matter how seemingly trivial. That’s what kept me reading even as my cringing muscles grew sore: feeling in my screwed-up face, barked laughs, and watery eyes the translation of that private kind of pain into something I could share.” —Claire Benoit, The Paris Review

“There’s a casually intimidating power to Moshfegh’s writing—the deadpan frankness and softly cutting sentences—that makes any comparison feel not quite right.” —Anne Diebel, London Review of Books

Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Death in Her Hands, and Lapvona, her next three novels, were New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World and a novella, McGlue. She lives in Southern California. View titles by Ottessa Moshfegh

One

whenever i woke up, night or day, I'd shuffle through the bright marble foyer of my building and go up the block and around the corner where there was a bodega that never closed. I'd get two large coffees with cream and six sugars each, chug the first one in the elevator on the way back up to my apartment, then sip the second one slowly while I watched movies and ate animal crackers and took trazodone and Ambien and Nembutal until I fell asleep again. I lost track of time in this way. Days passed. Weeks. A few months went by. When I thought of it, I ordered delivery from the Thai restaurant across the street, or a tuna salad platter from the diner on First Avenue. I'd wake up to find voice messages on my cell phone from salons or spas confirming appointments I'd booked in my sleep. I always called back to cancel, which I hated doing because I hated talking to people.

Early on in this phase, I had my dirty laundry picked up and clean laundry delivered once a week. It was a comfort to me to hear the torn plastic bags rustle in the draft from the living room windows. I liked catching whiffs of the fresh laundry smell while I dozed off on the sofa. But after a while, it was too much trouble to gather up all the dirty clothes and stuff them in the laundry bag. And the sound of my own washer and dryer interfered with my sleep. So I just threw away my dirty underpants. All the old pairs reminded me of Trevor, anyway. For a while, tacky lingerie from Victoria's Secret kept showing up in the mail-frilly fuchsia and lime green thongs and teddies and baby-doll nightgowns, each sealed in a clear plastic Baggie. I stuffed the little Baggies into the closet and went commando. An occasional package from Barneys or Saks provided me with men's pajamas and other things I couldn't remember ordering-cashmere socks, graphic T-shirts, designer jeans.

I took a shower once a week at most. I stopped tweezing, stopped bleaching, stopped waxing, stopped brushing my hair. No moisturizing or exfoliating. No shaving. I left the apartment infrequently. I had all my bills on automatic payment plans. I'd already paid a year of property taxes on my apartment and on my dead parents' old house upstate. Rent money from the tenants in that house showed up in my checking account by direct deposit every month. Unemployment was rolling in as long as I made the weekly call into the automated service and pressed "1" for "yes" when the robot asked if I'd made a sincere effort to find a job. That was enough to cover the copayments on all my prescriptions, and whatever I picked up at the bodega. Plus, I had investments. My dead father's financial advisor kept track of all that and sent me quarterly statements that I never read. I had plenty of money in my savings account, too-enough to live on for a few years as long as I didn't do anything spectacular. On top of all this, I had a high credit limit on my Visa card. I wasn't worried about money.

I had started "hibernating" as best I could in mid-June of 2000. I was twenty-four years old. I watched summer die and autumn turn cold and gray through a broken slat in the blinds. My muscles withered. The sheets on my bed yellowed, although I usually fell asleep in front of the television on the sofa, which was from Pottery Barn and striped blue and white and sagging and covered in coffee and sweat stains.

I didn't do much in my waking hours besides watch movies. I couldn't stand to watch regular television. Especially at the beginning, TV aroused too much in me, and I'd get compulsive about the remote, clicking around, scoffing at everything and agitating myself. I couldn't handle it. The only news I could read were the sensational headlines on the local daily papers at the bodega. I'd quickly glance at them as I paid for my coffees. Bush versus Gore for president. Somebody important died, a child was kidnapped, a senator stole money, a famous athlete cheated on his pregnant wife. Things were happening in New York City-they always are-but none of it affected me. This was the beauty of sleep-reality detached itself and appeared in my mind as casually as a movie or a dream. It was easy to ignore things that didn't concern me. Subway workers went on strike. A hurricane came and went. It didn't matter. Extraterrestrials could have invaded, locusts could have swarmed, and I would have noted it, but I wouldn't have worried.

When I needed more pills, I ventured out to the Rite Aid three blocks away. That was always a painful passage. Walking up First Avenue, everything made me cringe. I was like a baby being born-the air hurt, the light hurt, the details of the world seemed garish and hostile. I relied on alcohol only on the days of these excursions-a shot of vodka before I went out and walked past all the little bistros and cafes and shops I'd frequented when I was out there, pretending to live a life. Otherwise I tried to limit myself to a one-block radius around my apartment.

The men who worked at the bodega were all young Egyptians. Besides my psychiatrist Dr. Tuttle, my friend Reva, and the doormen at my building, the Egyptians were the only people I saw on a regular basis. They were relatively handsome, a few of them more than the others. They had square jaws and manly foreheads, bold, caterpillary eyebrows. And they all looked like they had eyeliner on. There must have been half a dozen of them-brothers or cousins, I assumed. Their style deterred me. They wore soccer jerseys and leather racing jackets and gold chains with crosses and played Z100 on the radio. They had absolutely no sense of humor. When I'd first moved to the neighborhood, they'd been flirty, even annoyingly so. But once I'd begun shuffling in with eye boogers and scum at the corners of my mouth at odd hours, they quit trying to win my affection.

"You have something," the man behind the counter said one morning, gesturing to his chin with long brown fingers. I just waved my hand. There was toothpaste crusted all over my face, I discovered later.

After a few months of sloppy, half-asleep patronage, the Egyptians started calling me "boss" and readily accepted my fifty cents when I asked for a loosie, which I did often. I could have gone to any number of places for coffee, but I liked the bodega. It was close, and the coffee was consistently bad, and I didn't have to confront anyone ordering a brioche bun or no-foam latte. No children with runny noses or Swedish au pairs. No sterilized professionals, no people on dates. The bodega coffee was working-class coffee-coffee for doormen and deliverymen and handymen and busboys and housekeepers. The air in there was heavy with the perfume of cheap cleaning detergents and mildew. I could rely on the clouded freezer full of ice cream and popsicles and plastic cups of ice. The clear Plexiglas compartments above the counter were filled with gum and candy. Nothing ever changed: cigarettes in neat rows, rolls of scratch tickets, twelve different brands of bottled water, beer, sandwich bread, a case of meats and cheeses nobody ever bought, a tray of stale Portuguese rolls, a basket of plastic-wrapped fruit, a whole wall of magazines that I avoided. I didn't want to read more than newspaper headlines. I steered clear of anything that might pique my intellect or make me envious or anxious. I kept my head down.

Reva would show up at my apartment with a bottle of wine from time to time and insist on keeping me company. Her mother was dying of cancer. That, among many other things, made me not want to see her.

"You forgot I was coming over?" Reva would ask, pushing her way past me into the living room and flipping on the lights. "We talked last night, remember?"

I liked to call Reva just as the Ambien was kicking in, or the Solfoton, or whatever. According to her, I only ever wanted to talk about Harrison Ford or Whoopi Goldberg, which she said was fine. "Last night you recounted the entire plot of Frantic. And you did the scene where they're driving in the car, with the cocaine. You went on and on."

"Emmanuelle Seigner is amazing in that movie."

"That's exactly what you said last night."

I was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you'd feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide. Not that what I was doing was suicide. In fact, it was the opposite of suicide. My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to save my life.

"Now get in the shower," Reva would say, heading into the kitchen. "I'll take out the trash."

I loved Reva, but I didn't like her anymore. We'd been friends since college, long enough that all we had left in common was our history together, a complex circuit of resentment, memory, jealousy, denial, and a few dresses I'd let Reva borrow, which she'd promised to dry clean and return but never did. She worked as an executive assistant for an insurance brokerage firm in Midtown. She was an only child, a gym rat, had a blotchy red birthmark on her neck in the shape of Florida, a gum-chewing habit that gave her TMJ and breath that reeked of cinnamon and green apple candy. She liked to come over to my place, clear a space for herself on the armchair, comment on the state of the apartment, say I looked like I'd lost more weight, and complain about work, all while refilling her wine glass after every sip.

"People don't understand what it's like for me," she said. "They take it for granted that I'm always going to be cheerful. Meanwhile, these assholes think they can go around treating everyone below them like shit. And I'm supposed to giggle and look cute and send their faxes? Fuck them. Let them all go bald and burn in hell."

Reva was having an affair with her boss, Ken, a middle-aged man with a wife and child. She was open about her obsession with him, but she tried to hide that they were sexually involved. She once showed me a picture of him in a company brochure-tall, big shoulders, white button-down shirt, blue tie, face so nondescript, so boring, he may as well have been molded out of plastic. Reva had a thing for older men, as did I. Men our age, Reva said, were too corny, too affectionate, too needy. I could understand her disgust, but I'd never met a man like that. All the men I'd ever been with, young as well as old, had been detached and unfriendly.

"You're a cold fish, that's why," Reva explained. "Like attracts like."

As a friend, Reva was indeed corny and affectionate and needy, but she was also very secretive and occasionally very patronizing. She couldn't or simply wouldn't understand why I wanted to sleep all the time, and she was always rubbing my nose in her moral high ground and telling me to "face the music" about whatever bad habit I'd been stuck on at the time. The summer I started sleeping, Reva admonished me for "squandering my bikini body." "Smoking kills." "You should get out more." "Are you getting enough protein in your diet?" Et cetera.

"I'm not a baby, Reva."

"I'm just worried about you. Because I care. Because I love you," she'd say.

Since we'd met junior year, Reva could never soberly admit to any desire that was remotely uncouth. But she wasn't perfect. "She's no white lily," as my mother would have said. I'd known for years that Reva was bulimic. I knew she masturbated with an electric neck massager because she was too embarrassed to buy a proper vibrator from a sex shop. I knew she was deep in debt from college and years of maxed-out credit cards, and that she shoplifted testers from the beauty section of the health food store near her apartment on the Upper West Side. I'd seen the tester stickers on various items in the huge bag of makeup she carried around wherever she went. She was a slave to vanity and status, which was not unusual in a place like Manhattan, but I found her desperation especially irritating. It made it hard for me to respect her intelligence. She was so obsessed with brand names, conformity, "fitting in." She made regular trips down to Chinatown for the latest knockoff designer handbags. She'd given me a Dooney & Bourke wallet for Christmas once. She got us matching fake Coach key rings.

Ironically, her desire to be classy had always been the dŽclassŽ thorn in her side. "Studied grace is not grace," I once tried to explain. "Charm is not a hairstyle. You either have it or you don't. The more you try to be fashionable, the tackier you'll look." Nothing hurt Reva more than effortless beauty, like mine. When we'd watched Before Sunrise on video one day, she'd said, "Did you know Julie Delpy's a feminist? I wonder if that's why she's not skinnier. No way they'd cast her in this role if she were American. See how soft her arms are? Nobody here tolerates arm flab. Arm flab is a killer. It's like the SAT's. You don't even exist if you're below 1400."

"Does it make you happy that Julie Delpy has arm flab?" I'd asked her.

"No," she'd said after some consideration. "Happiness is not what I'd call it. More like satisfaction."

Jealousy was one thing Reva didn't seem to feel the need to hide from me. Ever since we'd formed a friendship, if I told her that something good happened, she'd whine "No fair" often enough that it became a kind of catchphrase that she would toss off casually, her voice flat. It was an automatic response to my good grade, a new shade of lipstick, the last popsicle, my expensive haircut. "No fair." I'd make my fingers like a cross and hold them out between us, as though to protect me from her envy and wrath. I once asked her whether her jealousy had anything to do with her being Jewish, if she thought things came easier to me because I was a WASP.

"It's not because I'm Jewish," I remember her saying. This was right around graduation, when I'd made the dean's list despite having skipped more than half my classes senior year, and Reva had bombed the GRE. "It's because I'm fat." She really wasn't. She was very pretty, in fact.