My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Our narrator has everything a certain kind of life is supposed to want: a Columbia art history degree, a Manhattan apartment paid for by her late parents' money, striking good looks, and a gallery job she can walk away from without a second thought. What she doesn't have is any reason to get out of bed — so she stops trying to. With the help of an eccentric, pill-happy psychiatrist named Dr. Tuttle, she assembles a chemical cocktail of sedatives, sleep aids, and antipsychotics and sets out to sleep for a full year, surfacing only for coffee, VHS tapes, and the occasional bodega run.

Around her drift the people she can't quite bring herself to care about: Reva, her needy, image-obsessed best friend who is quietly unraveling from bulimia and her mother's illness; and Trevor, an emotionally unavailable ex she keeps circling back to out of habit rather than desire. When a conceptual artist offers to use her hibernation as the raw material for a gallery show, her retreat from the world briefly collides with it again.

Moshfegh's novel is a bleakly funny, deadpan study of grief, privilege, and the numbness that money can buy — a character study of a woman who mistakes unconsciousness for healing, narrated in a voice as unsentimental as it is compulsively readable.