44 pages • 1 hour read
Ottessa MoshfeghMy Year of Rest and Relaxation
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
The unnamed narrator is a misanthropic 26-year-old woman working at an upscale art gallery in Manhattan. In June 2000, the narrator—wealthy, attractive, and Ivy-League-educated—begins a project wherein she tries to sleep as much as she can with the help of various pills. While she wants unconsciousness to eclipse her waking life, she insists these measures are the “opposite” of suicidal; in fact, she sees the project as life-affirming and hopes to emerge from her “hibernation” a new person. In her waking hours, the narrator likes to watch movies because they numb out reality. In contrast, she can’t handle television or news, since it’s too connected to the real world and pulls too much at her emotions. She rarely goes out, leaving her ritzy Upper East Side apartment only to go to work or to buy coffee and snacks at her local bodega.
The narrator’s best friend from college, Reva, who works as an assistant at an insurance brokerage firm, visits her frequently. Though she says she loves Reva, the narrator finds her irksome and describes her mostly with disdain, especially regarding the young woman’s emotional investment in things the narrator personally finds meaningless. Unlike the narrator, Reva is not wealthy (and is steeply in debt from college), which only compounds her agonized class consciousness. She longs to fit in with Manhattan’s milieu; she cares about her career; she wants a family; she strives for achievement; she’s always trying some self-help book or self-improvement workshop; she fears that her antisocial friend is wasting the summer by sleeping so much. In short, the narrator finds her insufferable.
Reva also has bulimia and, though already thin herself, often expresses affectionate envy for the narrator’s even thinner frame (and for her charmed material life in general). What Reva and the narrator share, however, is a preference for older men. Reva is in the throes of an affair with her married boss, Ken, while the narrator weathers intermittent pangs for her “recurrent ex-boyfriend,” Trevor. The relationship began when the narrator was 18 and he was 33. Since then, the connection has been hot-and-cold; squeamish about the narrator’s attachment to him, Trevor mostly uses her for sporadic sexual release and tries to busy himself with older women.
Back in January, the narrator began seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Tuttle, to procure “downers,” hoping the medicine would put her to sleep and sever her from the world. When she first met with Dr. Tuttle, the narrator began by lying about symptoms of clinical depression, only to inadvertently realize that the descriptions partly rang true to her experience. Regardless, she did not want antidepressants; she wanted relief from the inhumane burden of consciousness. By the time she started seeing Dr. Tuttle, the narrator was already sleeping 12 hours a day; to obtain prescriptions, she fabricated insomnia symptoms, and the psychiatrist promptly prescribed a ludicrous cocktail of drugs—mood stabilizers, antipsychotics, anticonvulsants, benzodiazepines—each with its own sedative effect. However, it is only now in June that the narrator has taken up her hibernation project in earnest.
The narrator isn’t using the pills only to escape pain, as she actually finds pleasure in the oblivion of sleep. This fondness stretches back to her childhood, when she and her mother enjoyed naps together—and, the narrator believes, these naps were among the most positive experiences she ever shared with her mother. Her parents’ marriage was unhappy, and, when the narrator was in third grade, her father slept on the sofa; during this time, her mother let her sleep in the master bed with her. After waking up, the narrator’s mother, who had an alcohol addiction, would drink wine in a bubble bath. The woman seemed incapable of guilt and had a “cold aura.” Likewise, the narrator’s father was remote and even underhandedly caustic. There was no warmth in the household, and no pets were allowed, though the narrator badly wanted one. Her father eventually died of cancer, and, six weeks later, her mother died by suicide with mixed alcohol and sedatives. The narrator was a junior in college. Her parents did, at least, leave her a colossal inheritance, so she now has no real need to work. She’s paid for her Manhattan apartment in cash.
At work, the narrator regularly takes naps in the supply closet. One June night when she is alone in the gallery, she looks at an exhibit featuring a taxidermic poodle. In a grand flourish of spite—possibly inspired by the poodle and the bitter childhood memory of being denied pets due to their “messes”—she defecates on the floor. She is relieved when she is fired, which opens her schedule for more sleep. The narrator has always loved sleep and the escape it provides. She feels hopeful about her sleep project because she believes that if she can manage to get enough rest, she will emerge from her hibernation able to “start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation” (51).
Chapter 1 Analysis
The first chapter of the novel establishes that the unnamed narrator is a deeply troubled woman. Despite the many comforts her affluent background and good looks may provide her, she is inwardly immobilized by apathy and loneliness. By the time she reaches her mid-twenties, she is convinced that life is a pointless endeavor. The source of her pain clearly lies within, as her material conditions entail such privilege that they are almost satirical: a fully paid Ivy League education, a job at an upscale art gallery, effortless physical beauty, an inheritance so lavish that she can live in a luxury Manhattan apartment for years without needing extra income. Nevertheless, with no ambitions or loved ones to turn to, she lives aimlessly, as if she is only passing time and not actually living. Such listlessness lays the narrative groundwork for some of the novel’s major themes: the psychic toll of existential loneliness, and the human need for love, which, when unmet, becomes an ailment. Caught in a vain cycle, the narrator sees no meaning in human relationships, and because she has no genuine relationships (even with herself), her life lacks meaning.
The first chapter also establishes the narrator’s deep cynicism. She expresses a genuine distaste for humanity and hates interacting with people. Already in the habit of isolating herself from the world at the beginning of the novel, the narrator interacts with only a small handful of people on a daily basis, which includes the Egyptian owners of her local bodega where she buys coffee every day, her boss and colleagues at her art gallery job, and her best friend, Reva, whom she finds irritating. A reader cannot fully appreciate the narrator’s cynicism unless they consciously observe it at work her very narration: This is an unreliable narrator who routinely, baselessly, unabashedly ascribes petty motives—even whole interior lives—to those around her. With this in mind, it is helpful to reread her interactions with Reva in particular; the narrator attributes most of Reva’s behavior to vanity or artificiality, but, while Reva has her foibles, her actual words and actions rarely truly lend themselves to the narrator’s damning interpretations.
As hostile as she seems toward life, and for all the measures she takes to avoid it, the narrator longs to live. This ties into another theme: hibernation as rebirth. The narrator insists that she harbors no suicidality—and though she recognizes that her plan to use prescriptions to sleep as much as humanly possible is potentially very dangerous, she is so desperate to escape the misery of existential vapidity that she is willing to risk death. In fact, the narrator views her hibernation not as self-dissolution but as self-preservation: She steadfastly believes in the transformative power of rest and is confident that dedicating an entire year to sleep will save her life.
The narrator’s emotional disturbances stem largely from trauma. She is an only child, and both her parents died one after the other when she was a junior in college. Even before that, there was trauma: She describes a childhood spent tiptoeing around her parents, who were never particularly close to each other, let alone their child. Feeling like a stranger among her own family, the narrator discerned not only her parents’ lovelessness (for her and for each other) but also their pointed dislike.
This early emotional neglect has made the narrator vulnerable to other dysfunctional relationships, which themselves, in turn, only reinforce her grim view on love and humanity. Among these toxic connections is the narrator’s on-and-off relationship with her first and only boyfriend, Trevor. Because she met Trevor when she was a freshman in college and he was already well into his thirties, there was an obvious power imbalance in the relationship. Trevor tosses her around like a disposable sex toy, but instead of breaking up with him or looking for love elsewhere, she puts up with Trevor’s manipulative behavior. This suggests that she, having only a distorted touchstone for what love should look like, has little idea of what it means to be genuinely loved.
There is only one person in the narrator’s life who offers her love, and that is Reva. As abysmally as the narrator treats her, Reva is the lone source of intimate kindness in her life—and she will fill this lonely role to the end of the novel.
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By Ottessa Moshfegh
