44 pages • 1 hour read
Ottessa MoshfeghMy Year of Rest and Relaxation
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
In January of 2001, the narrator commences her new sleep regime. Before her period of intensive rest begins—as a measure to restart her life with a blank slate, which she believes is necessary for true rebirth—she gets rid of nearly all her belongings. She enlists Reva to inherit her massive, largely designer wardrobe and jewelry collection, to Reva’s mixed delight and puzzlement. The narrator explains that she will be going on a trip and will not return until June 1. Reva asks if it’s rehab, but the narrator remains vague. The narrator packs up the rest of her belongings, including furniture, appliances, and personal items, and donates them to a thrift shop. She keeps only her mattress and a small set of clothes, towels, and enough toiletries to last her until June. When she resurfaces from sleep every three days, she will eat, drink, and do some exercises and laundry for one hour before going back to sleep.
A locksmith installs a new lock on the outside of the narrator’s apartment door to ensure that she cannot get out without a key, which is in Ping Xi’s possession. In exchange for keeping her locked in the apartment and fed, Ping Xi is free to document the narrator’s hibernation for an art project, so long as he leaves no evidence of his activities when he leaves.
The narrator decides that if she wakes up in June only to find the sleep hasn’t somehow renewed her life, she will jump to her death from her apartment window. When the hibernation begins, the narrator quickly falls into her new routine of sleeping for days at a time and waking up only to eat and bathe. When she has established a steady rhythm, the narrator’s waking hours are “spent gently, lovingly, growing reaccustomed to a feeling of cozy extravagance” (273).
On May 28, the narrator wakes up knowing that she has only one Infermiterol left—and, therefore, one last chance to change her life for the better. She takes the pill and prays for God (or whoever) to show her mercy.
As she lies on the floor and stares at the ceiling, she feels the swell of sleep approach like an old, familiar rush of the sea. Unconsciousness descends. She feels herself begin to sink through the floor and down into darkness. It reminds her of her parents’ funerals and how their caskets were lowered into the earth; her heart flutters at the mere memory that she ever had parents. Then, she sinks faster, begins to fall, as through a Wonderland rabbit hole into a noplace of eternity and oblivion. She seems to be floating:
I tried to scream but I couldn’t. I was afraid. The fear felt like desire: suddenly I wanted to go back and be in all the places I’d ever been, every street I’d walked down, every room I’d sat down in. I wanted to see it all again. I tried to remember my life, flipping through Polaroids in my mind […] But I knew that even if I could go back, if such a thing were possible with exactitude, in life or in dreams, there was really no point. And then I felt desperately lonely (275).
She reaches out and grasps onto someone—though she’s unaware who it is—and their presence is calming to her. She feels tears leaving her eyes and can hear herself crying. She drifts away into nothingness. One June 1, 2001, she awakes to find herself sitting cross-legged on her apartment floor. Sunlight peeks through the window blinds. She hears a bird chirp and realizes she is alive.
In the weeks following her hibernation, the narrator experiences a major shift and begins exploring the world around her in ways she never has before. She strolls thoughtfully around the city and spends time in nature, feeding animals at the park.
On August 19, the narrator remembers it is Reva’s birthday, so she visits her friend for the first time in months. Both women have changed. As Reva chatters about a short story she read in the New Yorker, the narrator believes Reva is drifting away from her: “I knew she was just trying to fill the air, take up the time until she could go and leave me forever. That’s what it felt like, at least” (283). While the narrator feels hurt by the perceived emotional distance, she realizes she isn’t entitled to Reva’s friendship. Having developed a more thoughtful perspective since her hibernation, the narrator is finally able to see Reva for what she is: beautiful, even with all her nerves and eccentricities. The narrator tells Reva she loves her. Reva says she loves the narrator, too. It is the last time they see one another in person.
Ping Xi’s art project based on the narrator’s hibernation comes together in the form of videos and paintings based on her likeness. It’s met with mixed reviews.
The narrator receives a letter from her estate lawyer about her parents’ Poughkeepsie house, telling her someone has made an offer. The narrator takes the letter with her for a walk in Central Park, marveling at the fresh beauty of the park around her. She finally senses there is kindness in the world. She thinks to herself, “My sleep had worked. I was soft and calm and felt things. […] I could survive without the house. I understood that it would soon be someone else’s story of memories, and that was beautiful. I could move on” (288).
She finds a pay phone and calls her estate lawyer.
Chapter 8 Summary
On September 11, 2001, the narrator buys a new TV and VCR to record the news coverage of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, where Reva and Trevor worked. Trevor was out of state when the attack took place, but Reva is “lost.” The narrator watches the same news clip over and over, and she will continue to watch it whenever she needs courage or needs to remember that life is worthwhile. In the clip, a woman leaps off the 78th floor of the North Tower:
Each time I see the woman leap […]—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it’s her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I’ll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake (289).
Chapters 7-8 Analysis
Even before commencing her new January-to-June hibernation plan, the narrator shows signs of growth, however infinitesimal. When she commits to purging her apartment of nearly all her belongings, believing that her eventual transformation will require a blank slate, she has the forethought to donate her designer clothing and jewelry to Reva, who she knows will be delighted by the gesture. This foreshadows a new existence, one in which the narrator is thoughtful and tries to connect with others.
The rigorousness of the new sleep regimen enables the narrator to focus solely on resting, whereas the first half of the year was mostly concerned with escaping reality through sleep. When she adjusts to her new routine, she feels a newfound desire to care for herself in ways that are not destructive but loving and gentle. She is moving away from self-loathing and regret and toward self-acceptance and hope. It is unclear what is at the heart of this new trajectory; the narrator describes no directed effort toward either changing her perspective or treating herself differently, yet the psychological shift seems to unfold naturally. Though the narrative is often pointedly ambiguous, it seems that this rest—when treated as rest and not as escape—truly has an effect.
Her hibernation’s climax of spiritual metamorphosis occurs with the very last sleeping pill as the narrator has an ecstatic epiphany. The experience’s symbolism of death and rebirth is plain: She feels herself sink through the floor as though in a casket (she thinks of her parents’ funerals), become nothing, and reemerge. She finds radical transformation only when, during this experience, she looks back on her past and embraces it. As she accepts her life instead of damning it, this is the moment of her redemption and the beginning of her rebirth—and paradoxically, by embracing her past, she can finally release it.
Upon waking, the narrator feels renewed. Her transformation is evidenced in her newfound appreciation for even the most mundane details of life. No longer mean-faced and misanthropic, she enjoys being outside and engaging with life. She is ready to move on from her past, and this empowers her to sell her parents’ house in Poughkeepsie.
Some of the narrator’s greatest improvements appear in her last in-person encounter with Reva. First, she remembers that it’s Reva’s birthday; this thoughtfulness shows a new awareness of things beyond herself and beyond her own self-interest. Second, for the first time in the novel, the narrator questions her assumptions about Reva’s interior life: When the narrator says that Reva doesn’t want her company, she stops to qualify the remark, saying, “That’s what it felt like, at least” (283). Finally, she realizes that Reva, whom she used to find infuriating, is beautiful in all her complexities and that her friendship is a gift.
This newfound gratitude for the friendship reaches a pinnacle in the last chapter, after the 9/11 terrorist attack. When the novel opened, the narrator couldn’t watch the news because she felt it connected her to the world; now as the novel closes, she plays news footage on repeat. Watching the woman she believes to be Reva jump from the World Trade Center and dive “into the unknown” (289), the narrator is struck by the woman’s beauty and realizes life is worth living—and worth staying awake for.
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