My Year of Rest and Relaxation Study Guide

Ottessa Moshfegh was born and 1981 in Boston, Massachusetts, where her parents, both musicians, taught at the New England Conservatory of Music. She received a bachelor’s degree in English from Barnard College in 2002. She moved abroad after college, teaching English and working at a punk bar in China. She returned to the United States in her mid-20s and lived in New York, where she worked for a publishing house. She went on to earn an MFA from Brown University in 2011. Her debut, the novella McGlue, was published in 2014 and was the first recipient of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose. Her subsequent novel, Eileen, was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. My Year of Rest and Relaxation was published in 2018 and received overwhelmingly positive attention from critics. Moshfegh lives with her husband, the writer Luke B. Goebel, who collaborated with her on the screenplay for the 2022 drama film Causeway, starring Jennifer Lawrence.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation takes place in Manhattan between 2000 and 2001. Unavoidably, then, the novel closes with the September 11 terrorist attacks. On September 11, 2001, 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes, crashing the first two planes into the Twin Towers in New York City. Almost 3,000 people died in the attacks, which began the war on terror, a global military campaign targeting militant Islamist movements. Then-president George W. Bush used the phrase “war on terror” in a speech he delivered to Congress in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Another relevant piece of historical context is the rise in pharmaceuticals to treat mental health issues that occurred in the 1990s and the understanding of mental health issues as biological rather than social in origin—a major shift from the first half of the century, when Freudian psychoanalytical theory dominated the field of psychiatry. In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the protagonist’s misuse of prescription drugs and the negligence of the disreputable psychiatrist who enables this misuse suggests a critical attitude toward this shift. While a biological approach to mental health is the prevailing view in psychiatry today, and while the use of drugs to treat mental illness has been proven effective and is far less stigmatized than it once was, it’s worth noting that the mental health field continues to struggle in its quest to identify the root cause of many mental disorders.

Like My Year of Rest and Relaxation, many of Moshfegh’s other novels feature challenging and amoral antiheros. Her debut, McGlue, is a novella about a 19th-century sailor who awakes the morning after an alcohol-induced blackout to accusations that he has murdered one of his shipmates. Eileen, Moshfegh’s debut novel, follows a woman’s memories of the tumultuous and violent last week she spends in her hometown in Massachusetts, where she worked as a prison secretary. In a profile published in The New Yorker, Moshfegh criticized how much discussion Eileen’s titular antihero generated due to her “disgustingness,” remarking that people seemed to find the thought of a disgusting female character appalling. Moshfegh’s propensity toward brutal subject matters and unlikeable characters puts her in the company of authors like Flannery O’Connor (Wise Blood; A Good Man is Hard to Find), Elfriede Jelinek (The Piano Teacher), and Han Kang (The Vegetarian).