My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Like what?

Well, books like Sally Rooney's Normal People, Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Cleopatra and Frankenstein, and of course, Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life.

That is a heavy, heavy reading list.

It is extremely heavy, but they all share a common DNA.

Okay, interesting.

Readers are using the covers of these books to communicate their internal fears, their values, and their trauma to their followers without having to explicitly type it all out.

Like, if I post a beautifully filtered photo of my year of rest and relaxation, I'm not just saying I liked this story.

Right.

This is Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh, published in 2020.

Moshfegh is well known for her breakout hit, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and her signature style is deeply unsettling interiority.

Very uncomfortable inside the mind kind of stuff.

Yeah, you feel trapped in the character's head.

So read her as human and not the devil.

you willingly took a counter position with this dance on kathy and and a lot of your best work has come from counter position and i think that's i think what i admire so much about you right like i think you're not afraid to be like hey wait a second like let's let's look at it let's like let's look at it from over here for a second And a writer who I love, and I don't know if you've read any of her work, Otesa Mahashve, wrote this book called My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

And it's an absolutely fantastic book.

And it's about this woman who loses her parents, inherits all their money.

And it like I can't tell you like how many times I'm like, they're actually both just dog shit human beings like her and her husband.

But Natalia Ginsburg is another person that like really writes incredible characters, especially women, too.

Um, so, and I know Tessa Moshway, I would, I would think would be my year of rest and relaxation is a really great look at like how, you know, the deplorable female character too.

Um, but I, I don't want to be handing out deplorable female character recs as a man because that's not going to get me in any.

It's like it's very soothing in a lot of ways.

So this is called My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

And OK, I'm going to read the synopsis and then I'm going to tell you the book that it reminded me of.

OK, so.

But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, And it isn't just the loss of her parents or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva.

It's the year 2000 in the city, a glitter with wealth and possibility.

What could be so terribly wrong? My year of rest and relaxation is a powerful answer to that question.

Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine.