Putting Your Traumas to Rest: Uncovering the Neoliberal Myth of Self-Betterment in Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

The relationship between different types of crises (collective and private ones), the trauma resulting from their experience, and literature has been widely investigated in the field of Trauma Studies since the end of the 20th century. As critics argue, literature can be considered a privileged space to uncover, negotiate and sometimes even resolve traumatic experiences (Pellicer-Ortín & Sarikaya-Şen 2020), thus providing readers with valuable perspectives on quintessential human experiences. Bearing this premise in mind, and focusing on Ottessa Moshfegh’s most famous novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), my presentation will try to highlight how the fictional trauma experienced by the main character of the novel, while acting as a catalyst for the overarching narrative, simultaneously undermines conventional narrative modes by portraying a perpetual state of extreme distress. Set in New York City in 2000 and 2001, the novel depicts the emotional spiral of an unnamed female narrator in her twenties who, after losing her parents, attempts to sleep for an entire year, hoping for physical as well as phycological recovery––namely her rebirth. By believing that the solution to the protagonist’s mourning and psychological ailments is in her hands, this novel engages with and exposes––as I intend to argue by drawing on posthuman feminism’s critique to feminist liberal humanism (Braidotti 2022)––the typically-American neoliberal myths of individualism, self-betterment, and wellness. If in the US neoliberal context, traumatic experiences, as well as mental disorders become problems to be hidden and, most importantly, resolved, Moshfegh’s novel addresses the paradoxes and discrepancies inherent to this mentality, whilst implicitly reaffirming an ‘ethics of vulnerability’ and ‘care’, as theorized by Gilson (2013) and Braidotti (2022).