mini book reviews: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

hi friends!

Today I have something different for you, and I hope you like it! It’s a ‘mini review’! I post a few reviews on my instagram and I thought, why not also post them on here? I only have one for you today but I hope you enjoy!

𝒎𝒊𝒏𝒊 𝒓𝒆𝒗𝒊𝒆𝒘

I’d been putting off reading 𝓶𝔂 𝔂𝓮𝓪𝓻 𝓸𝓯 𝓻𝓮𝓼𝓽 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓻𝓮𝓵𝓪𝔁𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷 𝓫𝔂 𝓸𝓽𝓽𝓮𝓼𝓼𝓪 𝓶𝓸𝓼𝓱𝓯𝓮𝓰𝓱 because I’ve heard so many varying opinions. Some absolutely love it, others cannot stand the sight of it.

When I decided to pick this book up, my lovely friend @besssbookbonanza told me I was brave to do so in the middle of another lockdown.

I should have listened to her advice.

I love this book and it has become one of my all time favourite literary fiction books. But my god, did it fuck me up. Reading it felt like I was in the middle of a hallucination or a dream, where you know nothing is real but still you can’t escape it, you can’t wake up. It’s losing the threads of sanity and unraveling.

Our unnamed narrator is terrible. As in, she is the antithesis of heroines you typically see in fiction. She is the anti-heroine. Selfish, vain, apathetic, and toxic. But she is also miserable, lonely and really trying her best to be at least content with her life.

Even if she decided to sleep for a year; you can empathise with why she felt she needed to do that. It’s actually because she feels too much and she’s never really understood how to feel and process in a healthy way.

I couldn’t stop reading. I was compelled, I was alongside her in this strange and surreal journey. Ottessa Moshfegh doesn’t shy away from writing ugly thoughts – those thoughts which are horrendously terrible, but we’ve all had them at least once. Moshfegh peels away the layers of ‘civility’ and we see the raw human.

I honestly think this book needs to be studied because it also goes into ideas of gender performativity, of societal conformity as well as toxic female friendships and mental health. Our narrator is incredibly depressed and wondering about the pointlessness of it all. I highly recommend looking up trigger warnings before you read this book as well.

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Until next time, happy reading!

All the love,

allie