In her column “Rage on the Page,” Melisa Guleryuz ’27 reviews books about anger in women’s literature.
Ottessa Moshfegh’s “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” walks on a tightrope between satire, tragedy and feminist critique, defying easy categorization. Is it a portrait of grief and trauma? A send-up of self-care culture or an exploration of profound female rage? The novel is all of these things at once as it follows an unnamed protagonist who decides to sleep away her disillusionment with life. “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” sneaks up on you, offering the allure of a reveal to a woman’s disaffected exterior but quickly revealing itself to be something more.
This novel is many things — dark, funny, grotesque — but at its heart, it seethes with a slow-burning anger.
The story follows a nameless protagonist who has everything society tells us should make a woman happy: beauty, wealth, education and freedom. And yet, she is completely deadened inside. Disillusioned by the world, her solution is not to face her problems but to medicate herself in order to sleep through them — literally. “I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me,” the protagonist muses. Here, Moshfegh brilliantly turns the book’s absurd premise into an unsettling commentary on the modern experiences of women.
The novel centers the protagonist’s rage — though it’s never spelled out through grand speeches or violent outbursts. Moshfegh’s genius is in her restraint. The rage is quiet but all-encompassing, a product of a world that commodifies beauty, treats mental health with casual disregard and views women as decorative, emotion-regulating machines. Moshfegh captures the feeling of a woman so alienated from her own life that self-erasure feels like the only answer: “Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out in my sleep. I knew it.”
The protagonist’s wit and the novel’s dark humor are impossible to ignore. Her hibernation project is a parody of modern self-care culture. The protagonist’s extensive use of prescription drugs and sleeping aids — aided by the comically irresponsible Dr. Tuttle — acts as an exaggeration of the wellness industry’s promises. Instead of yoga retreats and green juices, she reaches for Infermiterol and Neuroproxin, using these drugs not to heal, but to disappear completely. As she said, “My intention was to lie as still as possible in my apartment for a year, living off the fat of my soul. I thought that it would cleanse me, I would regenerate and emerge renewed, with a clearer perspective.”
Her disdain for the world isn’t just passive; it’s weaponized through her sharp, cynical observations. “I was my own experiment,” she declares. This desire to “fix” herself through oblivion becomes a paradoxical form of rebellion against the very culture of female self-improvement. Why try to be better, happier or healthier when the world itself is irreparably broken?
What’s particularly striking is how Moshfegh never offers a clear resolution. The protagonist’s journey isn’t one of redemption or self-discovery; it’s a yearlong detour into numbness that offers no clean answers. Even as she emerges from her rest, there’s no indication that she’s any more enlightened or healed. Moshfegh isn’t interested in tidy conclusions, and that’s precisely why the novel resonates. It captures the exhaustion and futility that many women feel in a world that doesn’t seem to care whether they’re awake or asleep.
This isn’t a character who was designed to be liked — and that’s exactly the point. She’s intentionally and delightfully unpleasant. While other novels might give us heroines grappling with self-doubt, seeking love or trying to “find themselves,” Moshfegh’s protagonist rejects all of that with a sneer. The main character is selfish, cruel and dismissive. “I didn’t need anyone,” she declares early on. “I wanted to be alone, undisturbed.”
In a world that demands women perform emotional labor, be endlessly empathetic and strive for perfection, Moshfegh’s protagonist rebels through her total apathy. “If you’re smart or even just paying attention,” she says, “you realize the whole world is a big, evil mess.” It’s this very detachment, this refusal to be palatable, that makes her so fascinating to me. It’s not that she doesn’t care — she’s just done caring. She’s done performing, done participating in the farce of everyday life.
The protagonist’s relationship with her best friend, Reva, is particularly brutal and epitomizes Moshfegh’s exploration of cruelty and detachment. “Reva’s suffering was both pathetic and repulsive,” the protagonist observes. Reva’s endless dieting, obsession with appearances and desperate need for validation are constant sources of the protagonist’s mockery.
“Her attempts at self-improvement were always about how she looked,” the protagonist says, witheringly. The protagonist rejects Reva’s insecurities, which reflects her broader rejection of society’s expectations of women. The protagonist mocks Reva for her obsession with thinness, describing her as “bloated with vice, oozing sin and sadness.” This merciless judgment reflects the protagonist’s disdain for both Reva’s vulnerability and the broader societal pressures women face to be thin, perfect and constantly improving.
The protagonist’s cruelty to Reva, particularly when Reva is mourning her mother’s death, is strikingly callous. “I didn’t pity her,” the protagonist says at one point, making no effort to hide her contempt.
This is not a novel for the faint of heart. Readers should be prepared for a protagonist who is not only unlikable but actively hostile to the world around her. Her journey isn’t one of self-discovery or healing but of retreating from life altogether.
Yet, this is also what makes “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” so deeply evocative. Moshfegh taps into a raw vein of female rage and alienation, turning the protagonist’s insufferableness into a form of protest. The character’s apathy, her cruelty and her refusal to care become acts of rebellion against a world that demands too much of women while offering too little in return. Her detestability is the novel’s secret weapon, a tool Moshfegh wields masterfully to reveal the rage and exhaustion so many women feel, yet rarely express.
Whether you find the protagonist’s unbearable nature captivating or disturbing, one thing is certain: this novel isn’t meant to make you comfortable — it’s meant to make you think. And it does so through an unlikable, apathetic antihero. “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” is an artistic examination of female rage in all its muted, complicated and messy forms. You might laugh, you might cringe, but above all, you’ll recognize the profound exhaustion at the novel’s core. As Moshfegh so deftly shows, sometimes the only way to cope is to opt out — even if it’s just for a year of rest and relaxation.