[Minor spoilers below]

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is the story of a 26-year-old woman who decides to go to sleep for a year with the help of the world's worst psychiatrist and the many drugs that she prescribes. I wanted to love this book; the premise seemed interesting and I’d heard so many great things about it. In the end, however, this book was not for me. It got very dull towards the middle, and the ending felt lazy. There were some things I did like, though. I thought the psychiatrist was funny, I like that it was set in 2000, I liked Reva eventually, and Moshfegh’s writing was compelling to read:

  My mother used to say that if I couldn’t sleep I should count something that matters, anything but sheep. Count stars. Count Mercedes-Benzes. Count U.S. presidents. Count the years you have left to live. I might jump out the window, I thought, if I couldn’t sleep. I pulled the blanket up to my chest. I counted state capitals. I counted different kinds of flowers. I counted shades of blue. Cerulean. Cadet. Electric. Teal. Tiffany. Egyptian. Persian. Oxford. I didn’t sleep. I wouldn’t sleep. I couldn’t. I counted as many kinds of birds as I could think of. I counted TV shows from the 80s. I counted movies set in New York. I counted famous people who committed suicide: Diane Arbus, the Hemmingways, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf. Poor Kurt Cobain. I counted the times I’d cried since my parents died. I counted the seconds passing. Time could go on forever like this, I thought again. Time would. Infinity loomed consistently and all at once, forever, with or without me. Amen.

The things I did not like, however, outweighed the things I did. I did not like the main character. I understand that she's not supposed to be likable, but that doesn't make reading a three hundred-page book about her any more tolerable. She yells at the convenience store workers for fun, was terrible towards her only friend, Reva, was racist??? (comparing every black person ever to Whoopi Goldberg, guilt-tripping her ex-boyfriend by saying she’s HIV positive and “probably got it from one of the black guys at the gym”), and lied about being sexually assaulted (again to guilt-trip her ex). The ending was my least favorite part. After three hundred pages of nothing, I was expecting something to happen, but nothing did. This book was promising but, unfortunately, did not meet any of my expectations.