Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility what could be so terribly wrong? 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. Repeat five times, or as long as you need to. Feel your belly rise and fall as you breathe in and out. Working too long without rest reduces your concentration and can depreciate your emotional capacity. Breathe in to a slow count of three, and then breathe out to the same slow count of three. Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. The term 'sleep on it' is accurate because rest improves your ability to make decisions. The narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation might want to consider finding a new psychiatrist.

From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman’s efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes.

My rest and relaxation