Eileen was the most startling and brilliant book I read in 2017, so I had been anxiously awaiting the release of My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Ottessa, as bold and subversive as ever, did not disappoint!

Our nameless narrator is a pretty, rich, Columbia grad that takes a year to (hopefully) seal the black hole in her heart in life by doing her favorite activity - sleeping. With the help of a questionable psychiatrist, she loads herself up with any combination of drugs she can come up with. The next year is spent drifting in and out of hibernation, emerging for coffee, bodega coffee, and appointments (drug deals) with her psychiatrist.

Only Ottessa Moshfegh could write a book about a year of sleep and make it compelling. She is able to enter the vast and ugly internal life of an individual within a capitalist and materialistic world. Our narrator's existential dead, apathy, and dissatisfaction seeped into my own soul and made me feel recognized. Moshfegh explores an area of womanhood that female authors are discouraged from entering - the apathetic, ugly, selfish, listless, and dirty. She somehow can induce simultaneous discomfort and elation. I hate her characters and I love them. I see myself and I see what I never want to be, I see what I hate and I see what I love. Those last few sentences are the kind of flowery garbage our narrator's friend Reva would spout (much to our narrator's dismay) but it's truly how I feel.

Thank you to Netgalley for the review copy!