Bed-Rotting in Prada: 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation' by Ottessa Moshfegh.

I read this masterpiece just the right time; our world has somehow slid into the nightmarish scenario Ottessa Moshfegh lays out as ‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’ is bed-rotting in Prada, and she wrote it before the hashtag existed! Did she predict our absurd wellness trends? Our Gen-Z numbness? And then decided to write about it?

Some people go to therapy. 

Some people quit their jobs and go travelling. 

Ottessa Moshfegh's unnamed narrator decides the healthiest response to unbearable existence is to sleep through an entire calendar year. 

Honestly? She might be onto something.

'My Year of Rest and Relaxation' (2018) drops us into Manhattan in the year 2000, in the apartment of a young woman who has everything a certain kind of person is supposed to want, a Columbia art history degree, a trust fund, cheekbones you could open mail with, an inheritance from her recently dead parents and absolutely nothing resembling a will to live. So she comes up with a plan: with the enthusiastic, unlicensed help of the worst psychiatrist in fiction, Dr. Tuttle, she assembles a genuinely deranged pharmaceutical cocktail and sets out to sleep, on purpose, for a full year, in the hope of waking up reborn. Around her orbits Reva, her deeply needy best friend locked in a toxic, codependent dynamic with our narrator that's less friendship, more slow-motion car crash; a coke-addled Wall Street boyfriend who treats her exactly as well as you'd expect; and, eventually, an unsettling conceptual artist happy to make use of a woman who's barely conscious. It’s  American Psycho adjacent, that dead-pan, clinical narration has a DNA match to Bret Easton Ellis’s icon.

If that sounds bleak, that's because it is and also, somehow, one of the funniest books you'll read this year. Moshfegh has never been interested in making her narrators likeable, and this one is a masterclass in gorgeous, curdled unlike-ability: cold, self-obsessed, cruel about Reva in ways that made me wince and laugh in the same breath. And yet you cannot look away from her. That's Moshfegh's whole trick.

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Moshfegh herself has spent her career refusing to write a comfortable sentence. Born in Boston to a Croatian mother and an Iranian father, she trained at Barnard and Brown, and cut her teeth publishing in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Granta — picking up an O. Henry Award and a Pushcart along the way, because apparently subtlety was never the point. Her first novel, 'Eileen', announced her properly: shortlisted for the Booker, and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, before getting the film treatment in 2023. But it's 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation' that made her a cult icon, the kind of book that got so absorbed into the internet's bloodstream that "sleep as self-care" practically became its own genre of Instagram infographic, entirely missing the point of the book that started it.

Because make no mistake, this isn't a wellness manual. It's a razor blade wrapped in a duvet. Moshfegh writes about privilege, grief, and self-destruction with a deadpan so dry it borders on cruel, and her prose has that quality reviewers keep reaching for and never quite pinning down, something like being told your own worst thoughts back to you in a voice that isn't even raising itself. The comedy is in the details: Dr. Tuttle's increasingly unhinged prescriptions, Reva's self-help paperbacks, the sheer, magnificent stupidity of people trying to buy their way out of grief. But underneath the jokes is something genuinely raw about what it means to want to disappear, and how far a certain kind of wealthy, aimless woman can go before anyone actually notices.

And then there's the ending, set against the horizon of September 2001. This give the book anew terror of not oblivion, but consciousness, arriving right on time for the worst possible moment. Being lucid enough to understand and see. It’s a gut-punch. 

This is not a book that wants you to feel good. It wants you to feel seen in the ugliest, most unflattering parts of yourself, the desire to just switch off, to sleep until the world sorts itself out without you. Moshfegh doesn't judge that desire, and she doesn't indulge it either. She just holds it up to the light, unblinking, and dares you to look away first. You won’t.

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