My Year of Rest and Relaxation opens Goodreads in a new tab

My thoughts

This book is the most accurate description of what it actually feels like to be suffering from depression. And as someone who has a hard time coping up with my own demons this book was surely an interesting insight into the mind of someone like me. Someone who see the monotony, the pointlessness of it all. For a moment I felt joyful, and then I felt completely exhausted. There are so many parts in the book when i literally had to put it down, take a moment to absorb the fact that something like this is happening to another person and that what goes on in my head is not stupid and i'm not alone in this. Barely 20% into the book and i had lost count of the number of times i said "yes" or "exactly" or "this!!!!"in my head. For those of you who don't know this is about an unnamed protagonist who after being fired from her last job decided to take a year long break and just sleep it off. I can't point to any one event that resulted in my decision to go into hibernation. Initially, I just wanted some downers to drown out my thoughts and judgments, since the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything. I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me. Yes, she just decided to sleep off an entire year. While this may seem very bizarre and stupid to some on a surface level, this book is actually a very real account of what it feels like to be depressed. Nothing seemed really real. Sleeping, waking, it all collided into one gray, monotonous plane ride through the clouds. I didn't talk to myself in my head. There wasn't much to say. This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I'd disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was my dream. This was my first Ottessa Moshfegh book and let's just say I AM IN LOVE WITH THE WRITING STYLE. The characters, especially the women are so different? Like they are so morally gray, so different. If you're looking for cute lovable characters, this isn't for you. But if you want a character who will talk about snot, ass and pubic hair, this is the one. Obvious content warnings for suicidal ideation, abuse, death, suicide, toxic relationships, possible animal cruelty, sexual abuse, assault, addiction, animal death, extreme depression. Please look into those before going in. I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me.