My Year of Rest and Relaxation is gross girl-core at its finest. I loved this book. It was funny, sad, disturbing and basically plotless. The main character is, essentially, insufferable. She is a pretty, well-off, privileged white girl, living in New York City in 2000-2001 who decides the best way to process all her grief over the back to back deaths of her parents is to sleep for a year. She finds a quack psychiatrist, Dr. Tuttle (my favorite character), who I pictured as Professor Trelawny with a prescription pad. Dr. Tuttle is all vibes and she gives our lovely main character countless sample packets, miscellaneous prescriptions, and pays absolutely zero attention to anything the main character says. Then there is Reva, the unnamed narrator's self-proclaimed best friend. Reva is a disaster in her own right and though she is depicted as a bit needy and neurotic, she seems to genuinely care about our narrator who, in turn, finds Reva to be intolerable in her own way.

I love an unreliable narrator, so I ate this book up. Everything the reader knows is fed to us through the heavily-sedated lens of the main character. She is bitterly depressed, and I think the author did a good job of narrating the selfishness of someone who is deep in a depressive episode. The ugly things that are said to push the people that love us even further away.

Not everyone will like this book. In fact, a lot of people don't per the reviews I've read through, but if you like dark humor, the macabre, and no-plot-just-vibes stories, it is definitely worth the read.