I was astonished to find myself in a parallel "self-preservational hibernation", albeit under the very much not voluntary circumstances of a global pandemic. When the anxious monotony of lockdown got on top of me, I’d catch myself wishing I could just go to sleep until it was all over, and found I was thinking of the book’s nameless narrator, too. I thought of that cover image often over the last fifteen months, during the many hours I spent sitting inert inside my own apartment.
A poster girl for our times, though perhaps My Year of Dread and Depression would be more accurate for the 2020 update. The book’s iconic cover exploits this tension with style: beneath the hot pink text of the title phrase, is a neoclassical painting of a young woman in a white muslin dress sitting sideways on a chair with an expression of exquisite, sarcastic inertia on her face.
MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION UPGRADE
Set in the year 2000, it tells the story of a privileged young woman living on Manhattan’s upper East side who, dissatisfied with her life, resolves to spend a year holed up asleep in her apartment, aided by prescription drugs and a permissive psychiatrist.Ī story about a woman confined to bedrest for her nerves might sound anachronistic, but Moshfegh gives the Victorian trope of the confined woman an arch upgrade by framing it within the solipsistic individualism of the early aughts. I first read Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation in 2018, when life was busy and a satirical novel about a year of voluntary confinement sounded like fun.
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