“I was going to do it this time. I was going to make this year my year of rest and relaxation.”
— The narrator's opening resolution for her year-long hibernation.
Archivist's Choice
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Ottessa Moshfegh (2018)
Genre
Literary Fiction / Psychology
Reading Time
360 min
Key Themes
See below
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A rich, disaffected young woman in Y2K Manhattan tries to medically induce a year-long hibernation to escape her existential boredom, guided by an incompetent psychiatrist and powerful drugs.
Synopsis
In New York City, 2000, a beautiful, rich, and recently orphaned Columbia graduate decides to spend a year in drug-induced hibernation to escape her anhedonia and alienation. She gets help from the incompetent Dr. Tuttle, who prescribes many strong drugs, including sleeping pills, tranquilizers, and the experimental drug Infermiterol. The narrator spends her days in a semi-conscious state, waking only for basic needs, often blacking out and doing strange, forgotten things. Her only connection is with her best friend, Reva, an insecure woman who visits often, despite the narrator's lack of interest. The narrator's 'rest' includes brief, often hallucinatory interactions and her grief over her parents' deaths. As her isolation deepens, she pushes Reva away and loses her art gallery job. The story ends with the September 11th attacks, which she experiences in a detached, dream-like state, followed by a gradual awakening from her chemical stupor. She emerges from her hibernation changed, with a new sense of purpose and a quiet connection to the world she had tried to escape.
Reading time
360 min
Difficulty
Medium
Pacing
Slow
Mood
Darkly humorous, Alienating, Disaffected, Existential
✓ Read this if...
You enjoy dark humor, psychological exploration of apathy, and a unique, detached narrative voice.
✗ Skip this if...
You prefer fast-paced plots, uplifting stories, or characters who are easy to root for.
Plot Summary
The Decision to Hibernate
The unnamed narrator, a beautiful Columbia art history graduate living on the Upper East Side, feels disconnected and without joy. Despite her inheritance, her easy job at an art gallery, and a conventionally attractive life, she is unhappy. She lives a detached life, often ignoring her on-again, off-again Wall Street boyfriend, Trevor, and tolerating her only friend, Reva's, neediness. Wanting to escape her pervasive emptiness and the world's absurdity, the narrator decides to commit to a year of self-imposed hibernation through sleep. She believes that by completely disengaging, she can emerge a new, refreshed person, free from her current despair.
Encountering Dr. Tuttle
To achieve her goal of a year-long sleep, the narrator looks for a psychiatrist. She finds Dr. Tuttle, an unethical therapist more interested in prescribing many powerful drugs than in understanding her patient's issues. Dr. Tuttle, seemingly unfazed by the narrator's strange request to sleep for a year, readily provides a continuous supply of sedatives, hypnotics, and other psychoactive medications, including Ambien, Valium, Seconal, and later, the fictional drug Infermiterol. The narrator carefully records her drug intake and the increasingly disorienting effects, trusting Dr. Tuttle to help her escape consciousness.
The Descent into Drug-Induced Sleep
With Dr. Tuttle's prescriptions, the narrator begins her drug-induced hibernation. Her days become a hazy blur of waking just long enough to eat, watch VHS tapes, and take more pills, before sleeping again. She carefully plans her drug intake, aiming for maximum unconsciousness. Her apartment becomes a sanctuary of isolation, with the outside world fading. Trevor visits sporadically, often finding her semi-conscious or asleep, reinforcing her detachment. Reva, unaware of the extent of the narrator's plan, continues to call and visit, seeking comfort and companionship, which the narrator mostly resents and tries to avoid.
Reva's Persistent Presence
Reva, an ambitious but insecure woman, remains the narrator's only consistent human contact. Reva is obsessed with her career and appearance, constantly seeking validation and clinging to the narrator out of loneliness and shared history. Despite the narrator's obvious disengagement and often cruel dismissals, Reva keeps visiting, often bringing food or trying to talk. Reva's visits annoy the narrator, who sees her friend's anxieties and conventional life as everything she is trying to escape. Reva's presence highlights the narrator's deep contempt for typical human struggles and connections.
The Art Gallery Job and Its End
The narrator's job at a trendy art gallery, where she mostly answers phones and sometimes talks to artists like Ping Xi, is one of her few remaining ties to the outside world. Her boss, a detached and self-absorbed woman, tolerates the narrator's sporadic attendance and general apathy, partly due to her beauty and perceived sophistication. However, as the narrator's drug regimen intensifies, her ability to do even these minimal duties decreases. She often falls asleep at her desk, misses days, and acts erratically. Eventually, her boss, though initially tolerant, fires her, severing another link to her former life and allowing her to fully commit to her hibernation.
The Introduction of Infermiterol
As the narrator's body adapts to the existing drugs, she finds herself waking for longer periods, disrupting her goal of continuous sleep. She tells this to Dr. Tuttle, who, without hesitation or concern for safety, introduces a new, highly potent, and fictional drug called Infermiterol. This drug is described as a powerful hypnotic, designed to induce an even deeper and longer-lasting state of unconsciousness. Infermiterol marks a turning point, as the narrator's sleep becomes almost total, broken by brief, disoriented waking moments where she performs basic functions like eating and using the restroom, often without conscious memory.
Unconscious Acts and Blackouts
The introduction of Infermiterol leads to severe blackouts and sleepwalking. The narrator often wakes up in different parts of her apartment, or even outside, with no memory of how she got there or what she did. During these periods, she performs complex actions, such as going to the grocery store, buying items, or even having brief, nonsensical interactions. One incident involves her waking up with a new coat and a receipt, showing she went shopping. These blackouts blur the line between sleep and wakefulness entirely, showing the extreme lengths she has gone to escape consciousness and highlighting the dangerous effects of her drug regimen.
The Death of Reva's Mother
Reva's mother, who had been battling cancer, dies. This event is a devastating blow to Reva, who had a close relationship with her mother. Reva, in her grief, turns to the narrator, seeking comfort and a witness to her pain. Despite the narrator's deep apathy and desire for isolation, Reva's raw emotion momentarily cracks her carefully built barrier. The narrator attends the funeral, a rare trip into the outside world, where she observes the rituals of grief with her characteristic detachment, yet it is one of the few times she is truly present, even if only as an observer.
The September 11th Attacks
The narrator's year-long hibernation ends with her waking up on September 11, 2001, to the news of the World Trade Center attacks. She initially dismisses the news as another absurd event, a product of her drug-addled mind, but the omnipresent images on television and the collective panic in New York City eventually break through her haze. The scale of the tragedy and the shift in the world's atmosphere serve as an abrupt and undeniable end to her self-imposed isolation. This external disaster forces her to confront reality, effectively concluding her year of rest and relaxation and pushing her towards re-engagement with the world.
Emergence and Transformation
After the 9/11 attacks, the narrator gradually stops her medication, feeling a profound sense of clarity and renewal. Her year of radical self-isolation and chemical disengagement has, paradoxically, achieved her desired outcome. She feels cleansed of her past anxieties and the pervasive emptiness that plagued her. The world, though changed by 9/11, no longer feels as oppressive or meaningless to her. She begins to care for herself, cleaning her apartment and thinking about her future. She eventually decides to pursue art, finding a new sense of purpose and a quiet acceptance of life's complexities, finally feeling a genuine connection to herself and her surroundings.
Principal Figures
The Narrator
The Protagonist
She begins as profoundly alienated and nihilistic, seeking complete escape, and emerges after her 'hibernation' with a renewed sense of clarity, purpose, and a quiet acceptance of life.
Reva
The Supporting
Reva remains largely static, representing the conventional world and its anxieties, but her grief over her mother's death briefly breaks through the narrator's detachment.
Trevor
The Supporting
Trevor remains a consistent symbol of the narrator's past, toxic relationships, and is ultimately discarded as she seeks self-improvement.
Dr. Tuttle
The Supporting
Dr. Tuttle remains a static, satirical figure, embodying medical negligence and the enabling of the narrator's destructive path.
Ping Xi
The Mentioned
Ping Xi serves as a brief, symbolic presence, his art echoing the narrator's journey.
Themes & Insights
Alienation and Disconnection
The novel explores alienation, both self-imposed and societal. The narrator feels disconnected from her emotions, her past, and the people around her, despite living a privileged life. Her year of hibernation is a radical attempt to deepen this disconnection to the point of rebirth. This is clear in her detached observations of Reva's anxieties, her passive acceptance of Trevor's abuse, and her general apathy towards her job and the world. The 9/11 attacks, a moment of collective trauma, ironically break through her personal isolation, forcing a re-connection to a shared human experience.
“I was just a girl who wanted to sleep for a year. I wasn’t trying to die. I was trying to live.”
The Search for Self and Identity
The narrator's extreme experiment is a search for a new, authentic self. She believes her current identity is flawed, corrupted, or simply empty, and that by shedding it through prolonged unconsciousness, she can emerge as a better, more whole person. Her careful planning of her sleep, the documentation of her drug intake, and her eventual re-engagement with art all point to this underlying desire for transformation. The hibernation is not merely an escape but a deliberate, though unconventional, process of self-creation, ending in a quieter, more grounded sense of self after 9/11.
“I would be a new person, I decided, a new person who the old me would have been friends with.”
Critique of Modern Society and Consumerism
The novel critiques the superficiality and emptiness of modern consumerist society, especially in the year 2000. The narrator's privileged Upper East Side existence, her easy job at an art gallery, her designer clothes, and her inheritance all contribute to a life that should, by societal standards, be fulfilling, yet leaves her feeling hollow. Reva's obsession with brands, career climbing, and superficial relationships further highlights this critique. The narrator's rejection of this world through her hibernation can be seen as a radical response to the pressures and expectations of a society that values external success over internal well-being.
“I wasn’t a person. I was a collection of symptoms.”
Grief and Trauma
While often downplayed by the narrator's detached perspective, the trauma of losing both parents within a short period is a significant reason for her hibernation. Her mother's death from cancer and her father's subsequent suicide leave her with a deep emotional void she struggles to process. Her sleep experiment can be seen as a long period of mourning, a way to bypass the active experience of grief. Reva's more conventional and outward display of grief after her mother's death contrasts with the narrator's unique, almost pathological, way of dealing with loss.
“My parents were dead. My mother had died of cancer, and my father had killed himself. I wasn’t sad. I was just tired.”
The Body as a Site of Control and Escape
The narrator uses her body as a primary tool for both control and escape. By carefully regulating her drug intake and forcing herself into a state of near-constant unconsciousness, she asserts ultimate control over her physical existence, turning it into a vessel for her psychological experiment. Her body becomes a barrier between her and the world, a way to shut down all sensory input and emotional processing. The periods of blackouts and sleepwalking, where her body acts independently, show the complex and often uncontrollable nature of the physical self, even under extreme chemical influence.
“My body was a thing I was constantly trying to get out of.”
Plot Devices & Literary Techniques
Unreliable Narrator
The story is told through the perspective of a narrator whose perception is heavily distorted by drugs and detachment.
The narrator's perspective is profoundly skewed by her constant state of drug-induced haze, profound anhedonia, and cynical worldview. Her memories are often fragmented, her observations are biased, and her judgment is impaired. This unreliability forces the reader to question the accuracy of events and the true motivations of the characters, including her own. It also reflects her disengagement from reality, making her journey of 'rest' an internal, subjective experience where the line between reality and hallucination is often blurred.
Foil Character (Reva)
Reva serves as a direct contrast to the narrator, highlighting her unique alienation.
Reva functions as a foil to the narrator, embodying the very anxieties and conventional aspirations that the narrator despises and seeks to escape. Reva's constant need for validation, her preoccupation with appearances, her career struggles, and her emotional dependence on others, all highlight the narrator's profound detachment and cynicism. By presenting Reva's 'normal' struggles, the novel emphasizes the narrator's radical choice to opt out of society, making her alienation more pronounced and her journey more distinct.
Symbolism of Sleep/Hibernation
Sleep represents an escape, a rebirth, and a form of radical self-care.
Sleep, and the narrator's year-long hibernation, is the central symbolic device. It represents not just physical rest but a profound escape from consciousness, memory, and suffering. It's a metaphorical death and rebirth, a cleansing process she believes will allow her to shed her old, unhappy self and emerge renewed. The act of sleeping for a year is an extreme form of self-preservation, a radical act of withdrawal from a world she finds unbearable, ultimately leading to a quiet, genuine awakening.
The September 11th Attacks as a Catalyst
A real-world historical event serves as the abrupt end to the narrator's self-imposed isolation.
The 9/11 attacks function as a powerful external catalyst that forces the narrator out of her drug-induced stupor and back into reality. This real-world tragedy, a moment of collective trauma and global shift, shatters her personal bubble of isolation. It's an event so monumental that it cannot be ignored, even by someone as profoundly disengaged as the narrator. It marks the undeniable end of her hibernation, signifying that the world has changed irreversibly and she must now re-engage, paradoxically finding a new sense of purpose in the wake of widespread devastation.
Critical analysis
Notable Quotes
“Sleep was the only thing that gave me any peace.”
— Reflecting on her reliance on sleep as an escape from her life.
“I didn't want to think about anything. I just wanted to be a beautiful ornament.”
— Her desire to be a passive object, free from the burden of thought or feeling.
“The world was a terrible place, and I was going to sleep through it.”
— Her justification for her extreme withdrawal from society.
“I felt like a princess in a tower, waiting for a prince to come and save me, but I was also the dragon, and the tower was my own making.”
— A metaphor for her self-imposed isolation and the internal conflict it creates.
“I wanted to be unconscious for a year, to be a blank slate, to erase everything that had happened to me.”
— Her ultimate goal for her year of sleep, to reset her life.
“My mind was a garbage dump, and I was trying to clean it out, but it just kept filling up again.”
— Describing her mental state and the struggle to clear her thoughts.
“I was a connoisseur of sleep, a master of slumber, a virtuoso of unconsciousness.”
— Her ironic embrace of her unusual pursuit.
“The pills were my friends. They were my confidantes. They were my everything.”
— Her dependence on medication to achieve her desired state of sleep.
“I was so tired of being alive, of having to participate in the charade of existence.”
— Her profound weariness with the demands of daily life.
“Maybe if I slept long enough, I would wake up a different person, a better person.”
— Her hope that sleep will transform her into an improved version of herself.
“My therapist was useless, but I kept going because it was something to do.”
— Her ambivalent relationship with therapy, highlighting her apathy.
“I wanted to be a person who could just exist, without having to explain herself.”
— Her longing for a state of being free from societal expectations and judgment.
“The only thing I was good at was sleeping. And sometimes, that felt like enough.”
— Her final, somewhat resigned acceptance of her unique skill.
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Key Questions (FAQ)
The novel follows an unnamed, beautiful, and privileged young woman in New York City during the year 2000. Feeling profoundly alienated and numb after the death of her parents, she decides to embark on an extended period of drug-induced hibernation, hoping to 'reset' herself and emerge as a new person.
About the author
Biography coming soon.
