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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Self-Care, Self-Destruction, and Self-Indulgence
Isolation
Meaninglessness
Repression
Summary
Analysis
The unnamed narrator describes her ritual of walking around the corner to a bodega for coffees (two, each with cream and six sugars) whenever her medications wear off and she can’t stay asleep. Other times, she watches movies or orders takeout. For a while, she sends away her laundry to be cleaned. When that becomes too much of a hassle, she simply buys new underwear when she runs out of clean pairs. She collects unemployment, and between that, her investments, and her inheritance from her dead parents, she isn’t worried about money. Eventually, the Egyptian men who work at the bodega, her psychiatrist Dr. Tuttle, and her friend Reva are the only people she interacts with.
Not much is known about the narrator at this point, not even her name (which remains undisclosed for the entirety of the novel), but readers can surmise that she is struggling in life. Her near-total isolation and lacking motivation to perform a simple chore like doing laundry (and the fact that she is seeing a psychiatrist) suggests that she is experiencing some mental health issues.
Themes
The narrator reveals that she began this project of “hibernating” in mid-June of 2000, at 26 years old. During the scant hours she is awake each day, she mostly watches movies. In time, her muscles atrophy, and her bedsheets yellow. She catches glimpses of the news on the TV at the bodega but mostly pays no attention to the goings on of the outside world. When she needs more pills, she forces herself to walk to the Rite Aid, but it’s a painful walk, and she needs to take a shot of vodka to weather it.
This passage clarifies (albeit rather vaguely) why the narrator has been living in near-total isolation: she is undertaking a project of “hibernating,” aiming to sleep as much as possible and using pills or alcohol to force the issue when she cannot fall asleep naturally. This is troubling behavior, but what’s even more troubling is the narrator’s nonchalance: she doesn’t seem to regard her behavior as particularly unhealthy.
Themes
Reva drops by occasionally with a bottle of wine, but the narrator never wants to see her: she tends to call Reva when her medications are kicking in and can hardly ever remember the conversations they have. Reva claims that the narrator only ever wants to talk about Whoopi Goldberg. When Reva drops by, she continually drinks wine and complains about work and about her married boss, Ken, with whom she is having an affair. She also observes, jealously, that the narrator appears to have lost more weight. Reva is needy and insecure. She’s also bulimic and believes she is ugly and fat, though in reality, she is neither.
The narrator’s “hibernation” might represent unhealthy behavior taken to the extreme, but the details the narrator shares about Reva’s life (her frequent drinking, her ill-advised affair with her boss, her disordered eating and body-image issues) suggest that a person can appear healthy and functional to an outsider and yet engage in unhealthy, self-destructive behavior in subtler, less noticeable ways.
Themes
Reva constantly worries about the narrator’s concerning behavior—her prescription drug use, her smoking. The narrator, however, insists that she is actually practicing self-care: she’s simply taking a “year of rest and relaxation.” Meanwhile, she resists comforting Reva, whose mother is presently dying of cancer. Reva always visits the narrator at her apartment. The narrator thinks this is because Reva likes the narrator’s fancy apartment building—Reva aspires to be classy and chic, but, ironically, her efforts only make her seem tackier.
Reva’s concern for the narrator isn’t unreasonable, but it does come off as hypocritical given Reva’s own tendency toward self-destructive behavior. It’s unclear, meanwhile, whether the narrator truly believes her hibernation project will be healthy and restorative or whether she’s mocking mainstream society’s glorification of self-care—the optimistic idea, embraced by people like Reva, that life is fundamentally meaningful and that there is worth and value in improving oneself. Meanwhile, the narrator’s inner thoughts about Reva come off as mean and unsympathetic, leading readers to wonder why the women are friends at all.
Themes
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One day, the narrator tells Reva that they shouldn’t be friends anymore. Reva, upset, claims that this would be self-destructive. She leaves in a huff but calls not even an hour later, promising that she has “forgiven” the narrator for her cruelty.
Reva claims that ending her and the narrator’s friendship would be self-destructive, yet she ignores the possibility that maintaining the friendship could be just as self-destructive: the narrator looks down on Reva and dismisses her feelings, so it doesn’t seem like Reva is getting much out of the friendship.
Themes
The narrator explains that no specific event spurred her hibernation. Rather, she just “wanted some downers to drown out [her] thoughts and judgments, since the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything.” She began seeing Dr. Tuttle in January of 2000, having found her in the Yellow Pages. The narrator called her up and, after Dr. Tuttle discerned that she was not in the FBI, CIA, DEA, or any other law enforcement agency, agreed to see the narrator the following day.
Even if there’s no single event that motivated the narrator to go into hibernation, it’s clear that something in her past is troubling her. If there were really nothing wrong, she wouldn’t have so many negative “thoughts and judgments” to the point that she struggles “not to hate everyone and everything.” This passage also shows the narrator’s general disregard for her personal wellness—the fact that she found Dr. Tuttle in the Yellow Pages, combined with Dr. Tuttle’s apparent paranoia about being arrested, suggests that the woman is a less than reputable psychiatrist. She’s not the sort of person to whom one ideally entrusts one’s mental health.
Themes
Dr. Tuttle operates out of her apartment, which is cluttered, full of magazines and fake Victorian furnishings. Dr. Tuttle wears a neck brace the first time the narrator meets her. She rambles about “inner peace,” “cults,” and the dangers of “high-voltage equipment.” When the narrator lies, claiming to suffer from insomnia (she’s already sleeping around 12 hours per day) and asking for downers, Dr. Tuttle writes her several prescriptions. She advises the narrator not to fill them all at once, lest the pharmacy become suspicious. The narrator relates that she “can’t blame Dr. Tuttle for her terrible advice,” since the narrator herself “agreed to be her patient.” At first the narrator would research the various drugs Dr. Tuttle prescribed her, but that “sapped [their] magic,” and so she stopped.
Dr. Tuttle’s warning not to fill all the prescriptions at once further characterizes her as a disreputable doctor—if a pharmacist would be wary about someone filling so many prescriptions at once, it suggests that taking all these medications at once could be dangerous. The narrator’s acknowledgement that Dr. Tuttle’s advice is “terrible” shows that she herself is aware that her hibernation plan is more self-destructive than restorative, yet she takes steps to go through with it anyway, preferring to hold out hope that the pills and excess sleep will give her a “magic” solution to her ongoing issues rather than directly confronting the source of those issues.
Themes
The narrator recalls moving into her apartment on East 84th Street in 1996, the year after she graduated from Columbia. She still hasn’t had a conversation with her neighbors, who are all wealthy and “uptight,” like most people who live on the Upper East Side. The narrator herself is young, beautiful, and wealthy—and aware of it. For a time, she does what people in her position are supposed to do: she gets facials and goes out. She meets supposedly “interesting” people at the gallery where she works.
This passage establishes that the narrator struggles to relate to other people in general, from her wealthy and “uptight” neighbors to the carefree, “interesting” people she meets at the gallery. The narrator cynically insinuates here that most people conduct themselves with a phony, deluded sense of direction or optimism: they participate in society, buying things or socializing with others, because they believe it’s how a person creates meaning and purpose in life. That the narrator no longer gets facials or goes out suggests she no longer subscribes to such delusional thinking and behavior.
Themes
The narrator doesn’t have much luck in love, but she also thinks that “settling down” sounds horrible. Her one romance was with Trevor, an older, wealthy man she met on Halloween during her freshman year of college. He treated her to expensive meals and outings and took her virginity that following Valentine’s Day. The sex wasn’t enjoyable to the narrator, but she trusted him when he said it “was amazing,” since he had more experience than her. For the next eight years, they have an on-again, off-again relationship, with Trevor regularly discounting and toying with her emotions. Even so, the narrator claims she’d pick Trevor over the young hipster boys she went to college with. Those boys, she claims, attempt “to pass off their insecurity as ‘sensitivity,’” and people fall for it. She appreciates Trevor’s ability to “back up his bravado.”
The narrator’s cynicism extends to romance, as well. She seems to believe that people are fundamentally flawed and too self-absorbed to make themselves emotionally available to others. Knowing this, she prefers to find romance with people like Trevor who are at least confident enough to own up to their self-centeredness. She does not entertain the notion that people can be simultaneously sincere, interested in forming genuine connections with others, and sensitive to others’ emotional needs. For whatever reason, she has a bleak view of humanity and has lost the will to seek (or find meaning in) connection with others.
Themes
The narrator isn’t speaking with Trevor when she first enters “hibernation.” She thinks she may have called him when she first started using Ambien, but she’s not sure. She speculates that he’s likely hooking up with a 40-something woman—a brunette, probably. Blondes, like the narrator, “are distracting,” according to Trevor. For her part, the narrator has gone between trying to look like the “WASP” she is and the “bum” she feels like on the inside.
This passage gives more insight into the narrator’s upbringing and sense of self. “WASP” is a derogatory slang term, an abbreviation for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. It refers to a person who comes from “old money”—a person whose ancestors hail from Northern Europe and who has considerable wealth and influence. So, this revelation that the narrator oscillates between playing the role of “WASP” by flaunting her wealth and being true to herself and living as the “bum” she feels she is on the inside (perhaps by carrying out her hibernation project) suggests a sort of self-hatred or confusion about what her life is supposed to amount to and who she’s supposed to be. She has wealth and privilege and yet derives no pleasure or sense of meaning from it.
Themes
The narrator used to work at Ducat, a gallery that supposedly shows “subversive, irreverent, shocking” art, though the narrator thinks it’s all phony. Her boss, Natasha, hired her on the spot when she was 22. The narrator puts minimal effort into the job, and this is fine: she’s really just there to look young and hip and beautiful for the rich patrons who might buy the art.
The narrator continues to express a general disillusionment with people and their endeavors, cynically categorizing all the artists she has worked with at the gallery as phonies who lack conviction and rely on shock value to imbue their superficial art with the appearance of meaning and social import.
Themes
Ducat’s star artist is Ping Xi, a 23-year-old from California whom Natasha considers “a good investment,” as “Masculinity” is all the rage at the moment. Ping Xi makes Jackson Pollock-esque paintings of his ejaculate on canvas. He insists they have deep, political meaning, but the narrator thinks this is ridiculous.
Natasha’s categorization of Ping Xi as “a good investment” objectifies both art and artist, robbing them of meaning beyond their ability to generate wealth. Natasha’s attitude and the superficiality of Ping Xi’s work contribute to the narrator’s nihilistic view of the world.
Themes
In time, the narrator starts napping in the supply closet at work. She finds sleep comforting—and waking up “excruciating,” since when she does so, her “life flashe[s] before [her] eyes,” and sometimes this is so painful it makes her cry.
The narrator is drawn to sleep because the unconscious offers a respite from her “excruciating” waking life: it allows her to avoid or deny all that pains her. On some level, she seems to know that repressing this pain isn’t going to fix anything or make her feel better in the long run, but she’s not ready or willing to feel the full weight of her pain just yet, and so ignoring it is the second best option (or so she believes).
Themes
Things go well at work for a year, but then Natasha starts to notice that the narrator is sleeping on the job and slacking in her responsibilities. Ping Xi holds his first solo show, “Bowwowwow,” which consists of taxidermied purebred dogs. Rumor has it that he raises the dogs himself and then kills them once they’re the size he desires. He euthanizes them by sticking them in an industrial freezer—this method is supposedly “humane” compared to other methods, but it also allows him to move the body into the position he wants. Natasha expects that the rumor will outrage PETA and other important organizations—and that the resultant publicity will be amazing. Ping Xi’s “dog pieces” disgust the narrator, who calls in sick to the opening. The show receives mixed reviews, with some deeming it “Cruelly funny” and others calling Ping Xi “a spoiled brat” whose work is a joke.
If the rumors about Ping Xi’s methods of procuring his taxidermy subjects are true, then his latest show is overtly cruel, especially since there doesn’t seem to be a point to the project beyond shock value—he is simply being arbitrarily, meaninglessly cruel. That Natasha gleefully hopes for PETA or other animal welfare organizations to make a fuss further characterizes the art world as empty and superficial: ultimately, its driving purpose is not to shed light on morality or society or the meaning of human existence—it’s to generate wealth, which one could say about just about any profession.
Themes
Eventually the narrator messes up a big work assignment, and Natasha fires her. “Out of curiosity,” she asks the narrator which drugs she’s taking. The narrator insists she’s just been tired. The narrator has always loved sleep. She recalls how her mother let her sleep in the bed with her when the narrator was in third grade. Her mother, who’d likely been on some medications herself, would let the narrator oversleep, and she missed a lot of school as a result. The narrator recalls that her parents had been in some argument at the time. They had a bad relationship—she guesses her mother blamed her father for “ruining her life,” as she dropped out of college to marry him after discovering that she was pregnant with the narrator.
The fact that the narrator’s love of sleep began in childhood suggests that the troubles that prompted that love of sleep began in childhood, too. The narrator suggests as much by segueing into a description of her mother’s substance abuse issues, her and the narrator’s father’s dysfunctional relationship, and their resultant inability to adequately meet their daughter’s emotional needs. By relating the origins of her love of sleep with her unhappy childhood, the narrator indirectly suggests that the two are connected, though she falls short of directly making the connection.
Themes
The narrator’s mother came from a family of wealthy, Southern alcoholics who made their fortune in the oil and logging industries. The narrator’s father was a professor. Both her parents were rather cold, and the narrator takes after them. They died in quick succession (the father of cancer, then the mother by suicide) when the narrator was in college.
The details the narrator reveals in this passage make it clear that she had an unhappy childhood, but she refrains from saying so outright, conveying details about her past—and the more recent tragedy of her parents’ deaths—in a detached, clinical manner. The narrator has revealed that she finds her present life “excruciating,” so it’s clear that the events she relates here have deeply affected her, yet she seems in denial about it—or, at least, she seems to find it pointless to speculate on the origins of her present unhappiness.
Themes
After Natasha calls the narrator to fire her, the narrator defecates on the floor of the gallery. She wipes herself with some spare Kleenex and then stuffs them in the mouth of Ping Xi’s taxidermied poodle, then she walks out the door. She files for unemployment the following day, and it’s around then that she formulates her hibernation plan. She expects the sleep to make her “renewed, reborn” and to rid her of her “past life.”
The narrator hated her job and the people she worked with, but being at the gallery at least offered her the chance to socialize with other humans. In making this bold, obscene exit, she burns a bridge and decisively turns her back on society and the “past life” she lived within it. How, though, she expects her hibernation—which is effectively an exercise in avoidance, taken to the extreme—to render her “renewed, reborn,” is yet unclear. Increasingly, the narrator seems in denial about how and why she is in so much pain and how she might effectively begin to heal from it.
Themes
