Product details
Web ID: 9092818A Radical and Brilliant Story of Depression
Where most stories of depression warn against medication, Ottessa Moshfegh's protagonist sprints toward chemical oblivion. Her plan: sleep for a year in her 2000s Manhattan apartment, convinced she'll awaken reborn. The narrator is often unlikable—acerbic, cruel, and deeply cynical about the vapid art world she works in and the people around her. But to dismiss her is to miss the point. Moshfegh balances this venom with a palpable, relatable despair that makes her extreme project feel disturbingly authentic. Fueled by dark comedic relief from a wildly unethical psychiatrist, the novel is at once hilarious and profoundly unsettling. It's a striking, precisely rendered story that culminates in a challenging and powerful ending, leaving you to question what it means to truly re-engage with the world. Highly recommended.
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
I mean... I get her.
⭐️⭐️⭐️¼ I still kind of get her, which says something about me, but the narrator is so vapid and cushioned by privilege that it becomes hard to sit with for long. The numbness, the desire to disappear, the emotional checkout counter at life all made sense to me. The unlimited money buffer underneath it all… less so. Must be nice to spiral with resources. And the ending. Once I realized exactly where we were headed, I spent the rest of the book hoping we’d take a turn. We did not. The destination felt inevitable and kind of underwhelming, like arriving somewhere you already knew you didn’t want to be. Sharp and memorable, but also mildly annoying in a way that feels intentional.
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
HARD READ.
HARD READ. I'm not just talking about how spoiled and whiny the main character was; the storyline was boring as well. NOTHING HAPPENS. Other people like to say, "oh, that's the point of the book"........ yeah, okay, so I wasted my money on a book where nothing happens.
Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
Unfortunately I can’t get the time back…
That I wasted reading this book. Sometimes you take Ls when you buy books without vetting and skip the library. I didn’t know this author and that her whole thing is creating cruel and boring protagonists. The only good thing was Reva. If you like books where the character actually develops, books that aren’t flat and boring, this book is not for you. Some people claim they “get” this book but actually there’s nothing that deep about this book to get it’s just boring af.
Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
Could not put this book down
The entirety of reading this book I found myself having times where I genuinely needed to go do something, but we tell myself just one more page or be upset that I had to put the book down.
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
4 stars
MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION by Ottessa Moshfegh If I were to describe this in one word it would be: absurd. And it was, but in a good way. On the outside, our unnamed narrator has everything going for her. She’s young, beautiful, thin, a recent Columbia grad working at an art gallery in NY, and to top it all off, independently wealthy (due to the recent deaths of her parents). She has every privilege yet isn’t happy. When you can manipulate your therapist into prescribing you a bajillion different medications just so you can sleep whole days away, you might have a problem. This was a darkly comedic and satirical portrayal of a woman with mental health issues going through grief. She doesn’t have the capacity to deal with her loss so she turns to unhealthy coping mechanisms (prescription drugs). Reading this gave me so much anxiety because if anyone IRL did this, they’d be dead before the year was over! You’ll either love this book or hate it. Me? I kinda loved it. Rating: 4/5 ⭐️
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
10000 / 10
words cannot describe how much i love this book . this book expresses real and true mental health . if someone tells me they don’t like this book i could never look at them in the eyes again
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
She does it again
Ottessa Moshfegh is really making a name for herself as a master of character study. This is my favorite of her work yet. She creates these characters that seem so unreal on paper but then brings them to live with her words. By the time you're halfway through the book, you start understanding the character's motives in a way you never expected to. In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, our narrator experiments with drug-induced hibernation. Normally, this would seem like an incredibly dramatic situation, but Moshfegh somehow makes it feel... light and natural. It's a desire that many of us feel when we are in times of intense stress. I felt a sense of satisfaction in the narrator's ability to plan out and implement her hibernation (regardless of the unhealthy means by which she attains it) because at its core, I think this novel is a good reminder that we all need to take a break and return to ourselves before we can carry on with life.
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com