What if you could pause life and wake up new?
My Year of Rest and Relaxation turns that fantasy into something darker, prettier, and impossible to look away from.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation follows an unnamed narrator, a young, wealthy woman living in New York City in the year 2000. After deciding to escape reality, she embarks on a year-long experiment in drug-induced sleep, aided by a reckless psychiatrist who prescribes her an endless supply of medications. She spends most of her time inside her apartment, interacting only with her toxic best friend, Reva, and occasionally her ex-boyfriend, Trevor. As she spirals deeper into isolation, her dependency on pills increases, leading to blackouts and memory gaps. The novel traces her descent into self-imposed hibernation, culminating in a surreal and unsettling awakening.
The painting featured on the cover of My Year of Rest and Relaxation is titled Portrait of a Young Woman in White, created around 1798.
While initially attributed to Jacques-Louis David, a prominent French Neoclassical painter, recent scholarship suggests it was more likely produced by an artist within his circle. The subject of the portrait remains unidentified, adding an air of mystery to the artwork. The painting is part of the Chester Dale Collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., but is currently not on public display.
The Aesthetic of My Year of Rest and Relaxation
The novel’s aesthetic is a blend of quiet luxury, 2000s minimalism, and soft, melancholic detachment. It thrives in the tension between wealth and decay, beauty and apathy. Here’s what defines it:
The Wardrobe –
Think The Row, vintage Calvin Klein, slip dresses, oversized sweaters, and perfectly undone elegance. Clothes that drape, not constrict. Monochrome palettes, soft fabrics, and the kind of effortless style that looks expensive without trying.
The Apartment –
Sparse but curated. A white-walled New York space with the occasional expensive candle, half-read books, and unopened luxury shopping bags. A fridge with nothing but iced coffee and pills.
The Beauty Look –
Unbrushed hair, smudged eyeliner, and bare skin. The narrator is beautiful, but in a way that requires no effort. The aesthetic values natural beauty in a controlled, almost decadent way—like she just woke up looking perfect but doesn’t care enough to acknowledge it.
The Mood –
A mix of detachment, nihilism, and privilege. Floating through life in a dreamlike state, numbing the mind with art, fashion, and self-indulgence. It’s about stillness, withdrawal, and the quiet luxury of doing nothing.
The Cultural References –
Early 2000s New York, Bret Easton Ellis novels, American Psycho levels of coldness but with a feminine touch. Sofia Coppola films, especially The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation. The soft, vacant melancholy of a woman too beautiful to be bothered by reality.
This aesthetic, more than just visuals, is a mood—one that resonates in a world where burnout and hyper-productivity are the norm. It’s the fantasy of opting out, wrapped in cashmere and lit by the glow of a high-rise window at midnight.
There’s a reason My Year of Rest and Relaxation has become the ultimate aesthetic. It’s not just the soft-focus portrait on the cover or the effortless, detached femininity of its narrator—it’s the entire mood. The novel romanticizes isolation, indulgence, and self-destruction in a way that feels both repulsive and alluring. A beautiful, privileged woman drifts through an endless sleep, untouched by the demands of reality. She lives in a pre-9/11 New York that feels dreamlike, disconnected from consequence. She shops at high-end boutiques, pops pills with the same casual grace as lighting a cigarette, and does it all with the kind of undone, barely-there glamour that Tumblr and Pinterest love to immortalize. In an era obsessed with ‘that girl’ routines and hyper-productivity, the novel offers the ultimate counterpoint: luxury as inertia, beauty as detachment, and rest as rebellion.
There is an adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation in development. In 2018, Margot Robbie’s production company, LuckyChap Entertainment, along with Atlas Entertainment, acquired the film rights to the novel. Author Ottessa Moshfegh has been collaborating on the screenplay, and as of November 2023, she confirmed that the adaptation is “still underway.”
Director Yorgos Lanthimos is reportedly involved in the project, working on the script with Moshfegh. However, as of now, there is no confirmed cast or release date for the film.
Maybe it’s the fantasy of disappearing. Maybe it’s the quiet defiance of doing nothing at all. Or maybe it’s just the fact that self-destruction has never looked so good. Either way, My Year of Rest and Relaxation isn’t just a book—it’s an era, a mood, an aesthetic that refuses to fade. The movie might bring it back into the spotlight, but let’s be honest: it never really left.
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