Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Written by Ottessa Moshfegh
Now this was interesting. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is about an unnamed woman who wants to sleep for a year. It’s not clear at first why she wants to be unconscious for a year, and though we learn about potential contributing factors, the reader doesn’t linger there for long. This book is about her year of rest and relaxation. The woman takes drugs to conk herself out by finding a quack of a psychiatrist to legally prescribe her way too many drugs of an increasing variety until one drug inspires her to team up with an unorthodox artist to achieve the peak sleep ratio, one lucid hour for every three days. Powered by pizza slices, medication, and self-imprisonment, this woman finds her sleep, and through sleep she hopes to find healing.
This was one of the weirder books I’ve read (though after reading up on this author, I seem to have found the least weird one of her novels), and I relished it. I was in a reading slump when I watched booktuber FullofLit’s video called “Recommending Books Based on Your Favorite EUPHORIA Character”. I had not watched Euphoria, but I decided I would read down the list until the slump was vanquished. My Year of Rest and Relaxation was the recommendation for those whose favorite character is Rue (played by Zendaya) in case you were curious. It’s a quick read at just under 200 pages, and the plot is sleep.
For a story about the unique goal for 365 days of sleep, there was something in me that said, “I get it”. Sleep is healing. When a person has endured multiple angles of hardship, a reset through rest seems like the thing to do. Even when I have a particularly tough day, I’ll take a nap to “end the day and start a new one/do a hard reset”. It works. Sleep can be overlooked in its essentiality, so rooting for a woman to get the sleep she craves was cathartic. Though, full disclaimer, the way this woman achieves her goal is incredibly unhealthy and should not be taken to be a guidebook in sleep. This is not the cozy chamomile sleep in bed with the rain pit-pattering on the window, that we all deserve. This is pass out on the bathroom floor with a slice of pizza in your hair, not remembering who you texted last night or how you got home. So come join in. Grab your toilet paper roll pillow, towel blanket, and pizza eye mask. Would you like the bathroom rug or the tub?