My Year of Rest and Relaxation

My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) is a novel by Ottessa Moshfegh. Moshfegh’s critically acclaimed debut novel, Eileen, was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and was the recipient of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Moshfegh rose to literary stardom with her sophomore novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which, like her debut novel, follows the life of a competent but deeply unhappy woman in her mid-twenties and desperate to find a way out of her misery. Known for her candid and often blackly funny meditations on human life, Moshfegh returns to themes of loneliness, trauma, transformation, death, and coming of age throughout her literary repertoire. Be advised that the novel includes descriptions of substance use, suicide, eating disorders, and sexually abusive behavior.

This study guide cites the 2019 Penguin Books paperback edition of the text.

Plot Summary

In June 2000, the novel’s unnamed narrator is working as an assistant at an upscale gallery in Manhattan. With an art history degree from Columbia and a sizable inheritance from her deceased parents, the narrator lives a life of ultimate privilege—she is young, beautiful, wealthy, and plainly intelligent. Despite her many advantages, she is deeply unhappy in her life and, at 26, utterly ambitionless; cynical and misanthropic to her core, she has no desire to live.