“My Year of Rest and Relaxation” by Ottessa Moshfegh: The Triumph of the Liquid Society
- Francesca Rucco
- Dec 8, 2024
- 6 min read
I had started “hibernating” as best I could in mid-June of 2000. I was twenty-six years old. I watched summer die and autumn turn cold and gray through a broken slat in the blinds.
Renowned for her success with Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh published My Year of Rest and Relaxation in 2018, receiving positive reviews from critics.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh: Is success a myth, and is finding happiness always an individual task—fortunately or unfortunately?
Moshfegh’s hallmark as a writer lies in creating despicable characters, whose choices and personalities often make them incomprehensible to readers. In this case, the novel’s protagonist is a 26-year-old woman, and the author doesn’t even give us her name—a crucial piece of an identity that, as we later learn, is ready to decay.
The central theme of this novel is the protagonist’s self-imposed bodily hibernation. She seeks prescriptions for drugs that will allow her to sleep for an entire year, with the aim of waking up as a completely new person.
Our nameless protagonist is a young woman from a wealthy family, though she is now without parents. The narrative places particular focus on her relationship with her mother, especially due to her mother’s death—a fatal combination of drugs and alcohol.
This young woman seems to have it all: family money, a model-like appearance (blonde hair, light eyes, petite frame), an apartment in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and a job in an art gallery. Yet none of this provides her with anything meaningful, only existential problems concerning her role in society and how she believes others perceive her. She cannot find harmony with the world—not like her “boyfriend” Trevor or her friend Reva can. These two key relationships, the only ones the 26-year-old tolerates—“I hated talking to people”—are essential to her endless quest for balance in the real world because, in a twisted way, they are the only connections that make her recognize the apathy saturating her life.
Trevor’s relationship with her is unhealthy and toxic, using her primarily for her body. There’s no equitable emotional exchange, yet the protagonist doesn’t push him away—not because she can’t, but because she simply doesn’t want to. She needs a constant reminder of her role as a quintessential American, from whom people expect a life of success—firstly because of her family background and secondly because of her appearance.
I thought that if I did normal things – held down a job, for example – I could starve off the part of me that hated everything. If I had been a man, I may have turned to a life of crime. But I looked like an off-duty model. It was too easy to let things come easy and go nowhere. Trevor was right about my Achille’s heel. Being pretty only kept me trapped in a world that valued looks above all else.
Similarly, her friend Reva primarily views her as someone to compete with, using their relationship as a yardstick to bolster—or, depending on the day, to dismantle—her own self-esteem. Reva struggles with bulimia and sees our nameless protagonist as the person she wishes she could be, at least in terms of appearance. However, at the same time, she resents her static approach to life and her choice to remain in a job she doesn’t care about when she could achieve much more. Reva serves as a constant reminder of a world that does not accept the protagonist’s broken personality—a personality deeply scarred by loss, burdened by unresolved trauma, and drowning in it.
Ottessa Moshfegh’s Social Critique in Relation to Bauman’s Liquid Society
Here, we begin to see the contours of a social critique that Ottessa Moshfegh undertakes, exploring in depth the roles each individual plays within society. As the narrative progresses, it becomes tempting to connect her examination to the concept of the “liquid society” or “liquid modernity” as explained by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman.
With the erosion of the concept of community, unbridled individualism emerges, where no one is a fellow traveler but rather an antagonist to be wary of. This subjectivism, as Umberto Eco interpreted Bauman, has undermined the foundations of modernity, rendering it fragile. The result is a scenario in which, with no fixed points of reference, everything dissolves into a kind of liquidity. Certainty in the rule of law is lost (the judiciary is perceived as an enemy), and the only solutions for the individual adrift without anchors are, on the one hand, relentless self-presentation—appearance at all costs as a value—and, on the other, consumerism. However, this is not a consumerism aimed at the possession of desirable objects that bring satisfaction. Instead, it renders such objects immediately obsolete, pushing individuals from one act of consumption to the next in a kind of purposeless bulimia. Liquid modernity, to use the words of the Polish sociologist, is “the conviction that change is the only permanent thing, and uncertainty is the only certainty.” [1]
First and foremost, the protagonist’s sense of alienation is evident. Unconsciously, she longs to live in a world that moves at a slower pace, one where life isn’t solely defined by personal accounting or the extreme focus on self and individual achievement. This need to exist elsewhere becomes particularly apparent when she shuts herself inside her home, gradually surrendering to watching old movies that give her a sense of certainty. She repeatedly watches the same films, hears the same words, and observes the same actions. On one hand, she projects the outside world into her television, reducing it to the same oppressive sense of routine. On the other hand, it becomes a way for her to find certainty outside of the external reality—a form of self-imposed constraint more appealing than the one that exists beyond her walls.
What the protagonist seeks to escape is the narcissistic culture of forced self-maximization, where every personal journey seems destined to culminate in a celebration of individual success, crushing and devouring anyone running alongside to achieve the same goal. This shark-like world unsettles her, as does the expectation that she, too, must act like one to carve out her place and assert her identity.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation: Everything is Superfluous—You Must Always Do More, and Above All, Show More
The novel’s climax occurs when the nameless protagonist decides to “hibernate.” She seeks out a psychiatrist who is inattentive to her patients’ needs. She tells the psychiatrist that she suffers from terrible insomnia—and, as the sessions progress, claims that even with medication, she feels more awake rather than sleepy. This leads to her taking massive doses of sleeping pills, but her intention isn’t to end her life. Instead, she wishes to use this prolonged period of sleep as a form of hibernation, hoping to emerge from it as a new person.
(The relationship with the therapist is also crucial. Such an important role is filled by a woman who doesn’t genuinely care about her patients’ well-being, who fails to engage with their traumas and needs. It is a hollow relationship.)
I knew in my heart-this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then – that when I’d slept enough, l’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.
The protagonist needs to free herself from social conventions she cannot adhere to, and unconsciously, this becomes her way of processing grief. While this is not explicitly stated as her motivation, it becomes evident through one crucial point. Her relationship with sleep is highly symbolic in this context. Early in the novel, the protagonist explains that sleep was a tool her mother also used; sleeping together became their secret language, a shared means of solace. Almost symbiotically, the two would drift off in the same bed, and the magical moment just before falling asleep—that slow descent into Orpheus’s embrace—marked the beginning of a phase of ecstasy, transporting both body and mind into a serene, abstract reality, free from the pressures of the outside world.
“I was not a narcoleptic—I never fell asleep when I didn’t want to. I was more of a somniac. A somnophile. I’d always loved sleeping. It was one thing my mother and I had enjoyed doing together when I was a child. She was not the type to sit and watch me draw or read me books or play games or go for walks in the park or bake brownies. We got along best when we were asleep.”
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is not a novel to be read for its narrative twists.
It is a letter of rage against a hollow, sterile society, which transforms into accumulated and frayed apathy. The novel starkly exposes the mechanisms of personal relationships in a reality that feasts on toxic narcissism and shows how this can profoundly damage our inner selves.
[1] Published in Quotidiano Nazionale
Article published on February 26, 2024, in L’Altro Settimanale.
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