When life becomes difficult, it gets really tempting to believe that sleeping will shield us from all of our problems. The bliss of slumber offers temporary relief, but our problems will not vanish. On waking — and, while we are alive, we must wake — we still have to battle our demons and find solutions to our problems.

Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a novel about a young woman who decides to spend an entire year sleeping. The narrator is nameless, but she becomes very real as we learn about her depression and her desire to disappear from the world. She begins this period of hibernation in June of 2000, when she is twenty-six years old.

The only person who would visit, at least in the beginning, was Reva — a friend that our narrator met in college, but now is no longer sure that she likes. The bitter truth is this: you can love a person that you do not really like.

What Is My Year of Rest and Relaxation About?

On page 12, the narrator is telling Reva about her plan. “I’m not a junkie or something,” I said defensively. “I’m taking some time off. This is my year of rest and relaxation.”

But the narrator becomes dependent on sleep medication — trazodone, Ambien, and Nembutal — and a host of other things that she acquires from a questionable and unscrupulous psychiatrist named Dr. Tuttle.

The narrator is mum, at first, about her reasons for wanting to sleep for a year. But as we read on, we discover that, at the heart of it all, her wound stems from grief. Her father died of cancer, and her mother ended her own life not long afterward. They were both emotionally absent parents, but our narrator is scared, all the same, by how they left her alone in the big and cruel world.

Grief and Depression in My Year of Rest and Relaxation

This is another novel that deals with grief and the messy ways that it can change the lives of those left behind. It does not matter if the person who died was loving or even kind to those left behind. Death in the family is a change of life, a hole that needs filling, and we all seek ways to fill in the holes left behind.

In this book, relief is found in sleep — in the void, the nothingness of slumber.

In After Annie, the characters seek relief in distraction. They change routines, participate in romantic affairs, struggle with failing grades, and lash out in anger. Moshfegh’s narrator wants only to retreat, to enjoy the void of Dr. Tuttle’s prescriptions.

While much of this story might be exaggerated, here is another common reaction to great tragedy. Grief is exhausting — but, it struck me as I was reading, this narrator’s great ruse also seems exhausting to uphold. She thinks it will make sleep easier, but perhaps all the effort she puts into maintaining her isolation makes rest harder to achieve.

Indeed, grief is messy. It is not logical and it can often be unproductive. It does not always look like black mourning clothes and boxes of tissues. And in the case of this narrator, it takes the form of deep exhaustion, apathy about the world, and an urge to seek numbness at all costs.

But sleep does not make the grief go away. All emotions, positive and negative, are persistent; they demand, sooner or later, to be felt.

Reva and the Loneliness of Depression

The narrator tries to push away Reva, who is the only person consistently present in her life and who constantly offers good advice on healthy ways to grieve, such as leaving the house.

A person determined to suffer may push away anyone who tries to remind them that better things are possible. When someone is deeply depressed, accepting help can feel almost threatening because it requires them to imagine that their suffering might not be permanent.

In my notes about After Annie, I wrote about how good novels can help us work through grief. Grief can lead to numbness. It can cause self-destructive behavior. These are emotions that we are often scared to address in the real world; novels create safe spaces in which we can explore the darker emotions that live in all of us.

Reva had been having an affair with a married man that she knew from work. She is losing her mother to cancer, which means she’s constantly in need of comfort that the narrator is unable, or unwilling, to give. She has an eating disorder and always feels that she is overweight, though she is not.

The narrator sees all of Reva’s problems and is annoyed by them. She is self-centered in the way that one with depression can be: no one else’s trouble is worth the energy. No one else is struggling. Many do not talk about this truth — depression can make the sufferer feel as though they are the center of the universe.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation Ending

Spoilers ahead.

But after the year of rest and relaxation ends, the entire world changes.

On September 11, the Twin Towers fall. Reva is in the North Tower, where she worked. The narrator records footage of the tragedy and watches it constantly to remind herself that life is worth living. She cannot see those poor souls jumping to their deaths and dismiss their suffering.

After this tragedy, the world changes. New York City changes. And our narrator cannot remain stagnant anymore: she is forced to change, too.

The year she spent trying to disappear has ended, and the world has given her a terrible reason to become fully awake again.