My Year of Rest and Relaxation

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a book about going under. It’s 2000 in Manhattan, and our nameless narrator is 25, a Columbia graduate with an art history degree, thin, blond, and pretty. She’s also entirely disconnected from life.

Her sole friend is her neurotic bulimic former roommate Riva. She’s still obsessed with her deeply awful ex Trevor. Both of her parents are dead, her emotionally distant chemist father of cancer and her icy mother of suicide. She has an apartment full of fancy clothes paid for by her inheritance, and she just wants to rest. By any means necessary.

Any means necessary is a truly heroic array of psychotropic medications prescribed by the best character in the book, the delightfully insane Dr. Tuttle. Our narrator chews Ambien like vitamins and vanishes into endless repeats of Whoopi Goldberg and Harrison Ford movies, trying to clear her mind.

Riva intrudes, memory intrudes, the practicalities of living intrude, drug induced blackouts with unremembered partying intrude, and the narrator goes further and further in trying to erase her personality and return like a newborn baby, fresh and clear in a pure world.

This is a bleak book, and one that is fucking hilarious. As someone who is so fucking tired and who gets up every single day, I feel it deeply.