My Year of Rest and Relaxation: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

The unnamed narrator describes her ritual of walking around the corner to a bodega for coffees (two, each with cream and six sugars) whenever her medications wear off and she can’t stay asleep. Other times, she watches movies or orders takeout. For a while, she sends away her laundry to be cleaned. When that becomes too much of a hassle, she simply buys new underwear when she runs out of clean pairs. She collects unemployment, and between that, her investments, and her inheritance from her dead parents, she isn’t worried about money. Eventually, the Egyptian men who work at the bodega, her psychiatrist Dr. Tuttle, and her friend Reva are the only people she interacts with.

The narrator reveals that she began this project of “hibernating” in mid-June of 2000, at 26 years old. During the scant hours she is awake each day, she mostly watches movies. In time, her muscles atrophy, and her bedsheets yellow. She catches glimpses of the news on the TV at the bodega but mostly pays no attention to the goings on of the outside world. When she needs more pills, she forces herself to walk to the Rite Aid, but it’s a painful walk, and she needs to take a shot of vodka to weather it.

Reva drops by occasionally with a bottle of wine, but the narrator never wants to see her: she tends to call Reva when her medications are kicking in and can hardly ever remember the conversations they have. Reva claims that the narrator only ever wants to talk about Whoopi Goldberg. When Reva drops by, she continually drinks wine and complains about work and about her married boss, Ken, with whom she is having an affair. She also observes, jealously, that the narrator appears to have lost more weight. Reva is needy and insecure. She’s also bulimic and believes she is ugly and fat, though in reality, she is neither.

Reva constantly worries about the narrator’s concerning behavior—her prescription drug use, her smoking. The narrator, however, insists that she is actually practicing self-care: she’s simply taking a “year of rest and relaxation.” Meanwhile, she resists comforting Reva, whose mother is presently dying of cancer. Reva always visits the narrator at her apartment. The narrator thinks this is because Reva likes the narrator’s fancy apartment building—Reva aspires to be classy and chic, but, ironically, her efforts only make her seem tackier.

One day, the narrator tells Reva that they shouldn’t be friends anymore. Reva, upset, claims that this would be self-destructive. She leaves in a huff but calls not even an hour later, promising that she has “forgiven” the narrator for her cruelty.

The narrator explains that no specific event spurred her hibernation. Rather, she just “wanted some downers to drown out [her] thoughts and judgments, since the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything.” She began seeing Dr. Tuttle in January of 2000, having found her in the Yellow Pages. The narrator called her up and, after Dr. Tuttle discerned that she was not in the FBI, CIA, DEA, or any other law enforcement agency, agreed to see the narrator the following day.

Dr. Tuttle operates out of her apartment, which is cluttered, full of magazines and fake Victorian furnishings. Dr. Tuttle wears a neck brace the first time the narrator meets her. She rambles about “inner peace,” “cults,” and the dangers of “high-voltage equipment.” When the narrator lies, claiming to suffer from insomnia (she’s already sleeping around 12 hours per day) and asking for downers, Dr. Tuttle writes her several prescriptions. She advises the narrator not to fill them all at once, lest the pharmacy become suspicious. The narrator relates that she “can’t blame Dr. Tuttle for her terrible advice,” since the narrator herself “agreed to be her patient.” At first the narrator would research the various drugs Dr. Tuttle prescribed her, but that “sapped [their] magic,” and so she stopped.

The narrator recalls moving into her apartment on East 84th Street in 1996, the year after she graduated from Columbia. She still hasn’t had a conversation with her neighbors, who are all wealthy and “uptight,” like most people who live on the Upper East Side. The narrator herself is young, beautiful, and wealthy—and aware of it. For a time, she does what people in her position are supposed to do: she gets facials and goes out. She meets supposedly “interesting” people at the gallery where she works.

The narrator doesn’t have much luck in love, but she also thinks that “settling down” sounds horrible. Her one romance was with Trevor, an older, wealthy man she met on Halloween during her freshman year of college. He treated her to expensive meals and outings and took her virginity that following Valentine’s Day. The sex wasn’t enjoyable to the narrator, but she trusted him when he said it “was amazing,” since he had more experience than her. For the next eight years, they have an on-again, off-again relationship, with Trevor regularly discounting and toying with her emotions. Even so, the narrator claims she’d pick Trevor over the young hipster boys she went to college with. Those boys, she claims, attempt “to pass off their insecurity as ‘sensitivity,’” and people fall for it. She appreciates Trevor’s ability to “back up his bravado.”

The narrator isn’t speaking with Trevor when she first enters “hibernation.” She thinks she may have called him when she first started using Ambien, but she’s not sure. She speculates that he’s likely hooking up with a 40-something woman—a brunette, probably. Blondes, like the narrator, “are distracting,” according to Trevor. For her part, the narrator has gone between trying to look like the “WASP” she is and the “bum” she feels like on the inside.

The narrator used to work at Ducat, a gallery that supposedly shows “subversive, irreverent, shocking” art, though the narrator thinks it’s all phony. Her boss, Natasha, hired her on the spot when she was 22. The narrator puts minimal effort into the job, and this is fine: she’s really just there to look young and hip and beautiful for the rich patrons who might buy the art.

Ducat’s star artist is Ping Xi, a 23-year-old from California whom Natasha considers “a good investment,” as “Masculinity” is all the rage at the moment. Ping Xi makes Jackson Pollock-esque paintings of his ejaculate on canvas. He insists they have deep, political meaning, but the narrator thinks this is ridiculous. 

In time, the narrator starts napping in the supply closet at work. She finds sleep comforting—and waking up “excruciating,” since when she does so, her “life flashe[s] before [her] eyes,” and sometimes this is so painful it makes her cry.

Things go well at work for a year, but then Natasha starts to notice that the narrator is sleeping on the job and slacking in her responsibilities. Ping Xi holds his first solo show, “Bowwowwow,” which consists of taxidermied purebred dogs. Rumor has it that he raises the dogs himself and then kills them once they’re the size he desires. He euthanizes them by sticking them in an industrial freezer—this method is supposedly “humane” compared to other methods, but it also allows him to move the body into the position he wants. Natasha expects that the rumor will outrage PETA and other important organizations—and that the resultant publicity will be amazing. Ping Xi’s “dog pieces” disgust the narrator, who calls in sick to the opening. The show receives mixed reviews, with some deeming it “Cruelly funny” and others calling Ping Xi “a spoiled brat” whose work is a joke.

Eventually the narrator messes up a big work assignment, and Natasha fires her. “Out of curiosity,” she asks the narrator which drugs she’s taking. The narrator insists she’s just been tired. The narrator has always loved sleep. She recalls how her mother let her sleep in the bed with her when the narrator was in third grade. Her mother, who’d likely been on some medications herself, would let the narrator oversleep, and she missed a lot of school as a result. The narrator recalls that her parents had been in some argument at the time. They had a bad relationship—she guesses her mother blamed her father for “ruining her life,” as she dropped out of college to marry him after discovering that she was pregnant with the narrator.

The narrator’s mother came from a family of wealthy, Southern alcoholics who made their fortune in the oil and logging industries. The narrator’s father was a professor. Both her parents were rather cold, and the narrator takes after them. They died in quick succession (the father of cancer, then the mother by suicide) when the narrator was in college.

After Natasha calls the narrator to fire her, the narrator defecates on the floor of the gallery. She wipes herself with some spare Kleenex and then stuffs them in the mouth of Ping Xi’s taxidermied poodle, then she walks out the door. She files for unemployment the following day, and it’s around then that she formulates her hibernation plan. She expects the sleep to make her “renewed, reborn” and to rid her of her “past life.”