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My Year of Rest and Relaxation
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My Year of Rest and Relaxation
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My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Audiobook7 hours

My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Written by Ottessa Moshfegh

Narrated by Julia Whelan

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes

Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.

Editor's Note

Smart and strange…

This smart, strange book takes in everything from the art world to prescription meds to 9/11 and spits out an unforgettable story of a young woman hibernating away a year. Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys a good staycation.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 10, 2018
ISBN9780525524311
Unavailable
My Year of Rest and Relaxation

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Reviews for My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Rating: 3.697385751633987 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Even when you are young and blonde and beautiful, financially comfortable, unencumbered by familial attachments or the complications friends carry, you can still feel a bit heavy. Life is like that, or gravity. One of them gets you down if the other doesn’t. Sometimes you just want to sleep it all away. But getting there, getting to the point of real sleep, and staying there, that takes serious effort and planning and non-FDA-approved psycho-medications.The unnamed protagonist of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel has had some disappointments. Both of her parents died while she was an undergraduate studying art history. Her only friend, Reva, is intensely needy and unobservant. Her sometime boyfriend, Trevor, is emotionally distant and sexually unimaginative. Her waspishness practically guaranteed her a front of house position at a trendy Chelsea gallery. But it also ensured that she would lose said job in a fit of pique. The only thing that brings her any pleasure, if that’s the correct word, is empty chunks of unconsciousness, i.e. sleep. When she turns to Dr Tuttle, a somewhat unorthodox psychiatrist, she is prepared to tell her almost anything in order to obtain prescriptions for numerous and various medications to assist her goal of uninterrupted repose.The writing here is both inventive and subtle, even though the events described are rarely either. There is a certain inexorableness to this. Perhaps any novel set in New York in the year 2000 will have that feel, as though it is leading up to something, or falling, falling endlessly. It’s an achievement to hold the readers attention throughout, despite the protagonist’s recurrent and lengthy bouts of forgetful sleep. I was impressed.Recommended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Hilariously depressing or depressingly hilarious depending on your disposition. Bit conflicted about the millenium setting but there’s a lot to love about this book. Could be a Catcher in the Rye for the nihilist Twitter generation.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Once again Ottessa Moshfegh has created a protagonist who is narcissistic, self-destructive, and often extremely unlikeable, and yet somehow relatable despite it all. Our unnamed narrator knows she's got major problems -- she's lost both of her parents, who never cared much for her anyway; she's throwing herself into a debasing. exploitative sexual relationship; her only friend is a jealous college roommate she hasn't yet managed to offend enough to drive her away; and she's disgusted by the culture of turn-of-the-millennium New York City. So she comes up with a lunatic plan to sleep through an entire year of her life with the assistance of a truly staggering amount of pharmaceuticals supplied by the world's most irresponsible doctor, hoping to emerge having somehow changed into a new person.The appeal of her plan is obvious -- who hasn't longed to just take a few days off to rest when the world becomes overwhelming? And who hasn't wanted to be able to improve their life and become a totally new person without having to actually be conscious for any of the work or consequences involved? It's Moshfegh's genius that her novel recognizes the universal nature of these desires but also indicts the basic selfishness behind them. Of course we want to skip over the easy parts of being adults in the world, but it's just evidence of how craven and disgusting we all really are, just like the protagonist.I was a bit conflicted about the ending of the book -- I thought it didn't quite work as Moshfegh intended -- but her writing is beautifully readable, even when describing emotions and experiences that most people would turn away from. Definitely an ambitious and mostly successful work!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    As I continued to read this story, I just like the protagonist, wanted to take drugs to escape. Spending a year sleeping isn’t my idea of a good time. I couldn’t believe how the psychiatrist was so happy to add to the collection of pills. I give this book higher marks than you might expect because, this really was creative writing, being able to document a wasted year of a person’s life. It is the kind of book I am compelled to finish reading just to find out what happened to the main character.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Best for:People looking for a well-written, fairly quick read of no consequence, whose characters are all unappealing, especially the protagonist.In a nutshell:Orphaned rich woman (no name given, which I didn’t realize until I went to write this review) decides the way she wants to deal with her life is by sleeping. So she find a doctor who is willing to prescribe her all manner of sleeping pills.Worth quoting:‘It’s not about the men,’ she said. ‘Women are so judgmental. They’re always comparing.’‘But why do you care? It’s not a contest.’‘Yes, it is. You just can’t see it because you’ve always been the winner.’Why I chose it:I have picked this book up in shops probably a half-dozen times. Now that it’s in paperback I finally decided to get it. I’m glad, if only because my curiosity is well-sated.Review:This was a quick read, for sure. But I did not enjoy it. When I finished it, I wondered what I’d missed. Was this satire - a mocking of all those sort-of coming-of-age books written by white men about young white men? No? It’s just a character study? Huh.Author Moshfegh is talented, for sure. The book is easy to read, the scenes evocative and well-thought-out. I have a strong picture in my mind of every place described, and a real feeling about each place. But the overall idea of the book, the main concept, the plot, just didn’t work for me at all. As it moved along I sort of got a bit of why the protagonist was doing what she was doing. I think? Was she depressed? Probably. But was that what was fueling her desire to sleep? Or was she just ill-equipped for the world? Honestly? I didn’t care. Was I supposed to care? Unclear. Like I said, I might have missed something, but maybe not. Maybe it just wasn’t my thing. Entertainment Weekly said “One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years” and just … no. I disagree.Keep it / Pass to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:Toss it
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This wasn't the book for me. What happened in this book. She took pills and more pills and zoned out for a year. And then after that year not much happened either. Waste of my time.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
       "Holy shit!" These were the words that were on my lips as I finished the last line of this very dark, clever, and fantastic novel. Though the last line referenced an over-used metaphor, the line was perfection. The book is centered on a good-looking, privileged young woman living her NYC life on a wealthy inheritance. She's normally the most attractive woman in any room, has a stunning wardrobe, lives in a great apartment, yet she decides that her life would be so much better, she would be a better person, if only she slept more. She embarks on a life of narcotic hibernation. A willing doctor with no qualms about prescribing enough heavy-duty drugs to knock out a grizzly bear, makes her hibernation possible. The book is littered with the drug brand names that knock her out for many hours each day. Her parents are dead, her "best friend" has no real attachment to her, an experimental artist she knows only see her as a project. Trevor, her Wall Street "boyfriend" is another very odd relationship in her life, and it eventually collapses under it own lovelessness. Other than these characters, there are only the non-relationships she has with her building's doorman, and the corner store clerks. The book starts with her working a job she certainly doesn't need or have much of a connection with, and it disappears. Numerous flashbacks show her upbringing in a family household of severely-stunted feelings, the family member mostly just cohabitate. The word bleak entered my mind repeatedly as I read this dark story. Yet, through all the drugs, the lack of any real attachments -- other than to her pills -- the book takes you deep into our main character's most unusual head. The last part of her hibernation is even more intense. She gives away practically all her furniture, clothes, and other belongings, has the locks changed so she cannot leave her apartment, arranges for the artist to bring her minimal food and such, and then embarks on three months of a bizarre "rehab." She uses only forty of the strongest pills -- the ones that knock her out for three days each -- and starts her program. The schedule: take a pill, followed by three days of unconsciousness (during which the gay artist comes with some supplies and can film or record her in any way he wants for his art project), followed by her coming to and a short period to eat cold pizza, shower, and then it's time for another pill, and the next three days down. Does she rehabilitate herself? What is the final art project? Is she a happier, a better person? Those answers are all in the last pages of this intensely different and rewarding novel. It's a clever, dark, trying, painful at times, very original, and well-written novel.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This was like a fictional recounting of a fantasy I have that I know can never be realized: to go to sleep for a long period and then wake up as a blank slate, to start over again from scratch. The unnamed narrator of this book is intensely unlikeable, but yet she is so relatable, at least for someone like me, who knows from depression. I thought this was much better than Eileen, Moshfegh's other novel that I have read, which also featured an unlikeable female lead. And I think it's very honest, which can make for hard reading. This is not a book for everyone, but I think if it does connect with you, it will connect with you hard.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    My Year of Rest and RelaxationBy Ottessa Moshfegh2018PenguinWhen a beautiful, Columbia graduated women living in Yorkville, Upper East Side NY, decides to take a year off to deal with her depression, living on her inheritance, it changes her life. But not her depression. Over medicated by her psychiatrist, Dr. Tuttle, she spends her time worked at the Ducet Fine Art Gallery in Soho (the art described here really stretches the imagination), sleeping, and watching her VHS tapes she buys almost daily at a local thrift shop. Soon she is trying to navigate through her life in a dream like state." I felt myself float up and away, higher and higher into the ether until my body was just an anecdote, a symbol, a potrait hanging in another world."" This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I'd disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was my dream."One of my fave authors....this was a great character read, and was actually pretty humorous at times. Recommended!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Portrait of a Young Drug-Induced SomnambulistI had to keep checking the cover art of "My Year of Rest and Relaxation" to be reassured that it didn't have some sort of macabre twist to it like the covers of "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies", "Dawn of the Dreadfuls" or "Pride and Prejudice and Vampires". Nope, every time it was still a straight reproduction of "Portrait of a Young Woman in White" (c1798) by the School of Jacques-Louis David.Such was the unsettled feeling left by Moshfegh's new novel which steps away from the noirish crime fiction of her earlier novel "Eileen' but still has disturbing elements that it shares with the short stories of "Homesick for Another World" swings between parody humour of the modern art world and an existential crisis of the narrator who has convinced herself that a year of hibernation will be the cure of her modern world ennui. She seeks that solution with the aid of a tame pill-prescribing psychiatrist and a fictional drug named Infermiterol (which puts this somewhat into a noirish science-fiction realm).It was compulsive reading and entertaining as Moshfegh always is, but slightly wore out its welcome over novel length. There was also an element of predictability to it about which it would be a spoiler to say much more except that setting books at certain times and places in history will inevitably cause the reader to guess the conclusion which will result from that choice.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Looking at her from the outside, she has everything one could wish for: she is blond, pretty, thin, a Columbia graduate, stylish without effort and she has a job at a gallery. Due to her inheritance, she can afford an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. But that’s just one side of the medal, her relationship with Trevor has been all but healthy, her parents never showed any affection and thus losing them both when she was in college was a minor affair. What she is lacking is an aim in life, something that gives her a reason for being alive. She feels exhausted and just wants to sleep until everything is over. She slowly extends her time in bed, she even falls asleep at work and then, finally, she decides to hibernate. A crazy therapist provides her with medication that allows more and more hours of sleep at a time. She hopes that after a year of rest, she will awake as somebody new.Ottessa Moshfegh is a US-American writer who earned a degree in Creative Writing from Brown University and whose short stories were received with positive reviews. After her novella “McGLue”, her first novel “Eileen” was published in 2015 and made it on the shortlist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. Having chosen a mostly unsympathetic protagonist for her former novel, I found it much easier so sympathise with her narrator in “My Year of Rest and Relaxation”.The young woman who is portrayed is quite typical in a certain way. She is the modern New Yorker who takes part in the glittery art circus, is a part of a subculture of believes itself to be highly reflective and innovative. At a certain point, the superficiality becomes exhausting and the aimless tittle-tattle and prattle don’t provide any deeper insight.“The art at Ducat was supposed to be subversive irreverent, shocking, but was all just canned counterculture crap, “punk, but with money”.Also her relationship does not go beyond superficial sex and one-night-stands that lead to nothing. Added to this is the easy availability of all kinds of drugs, of therapists who themselves are too crazy to detect any serious illness in their clients and therefore just fill in any prescription they are asked for. Even though the plot starts in 2000, the characters are quite typical for the 1990s and they need a major event to wake them up and bring them back to real life.The narrator tries to flee the world and takes more and more pills mixed with each other, as a result she is sleepwalking, even gets a new haircuts and orders masses of lingerie without knowing. Her radius is limited to her blog, her only human contacts are the Egyptians at the bodega at the corner where she buys coffee, the doorman of her apartment house and Reva, her best friend who still cares about her. Even though she is bothered by the things she does when she is not awake, she has become that addicted that she cannot let go anymore. Even though the protagonist is highly depressive and seeing how badly she copes with her life is hard to endure in a way, the novel is also hilarious. I especially liked her meetings with her therapist since Dr. Tuttle is riotous in her eccentric ways and their dialogues are highly comical – despite the earnestness of their actual topics. Ottessa Moshfegh most certainly earns a place among to most relevant authors of today.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Ottessa Moshfegh's characters are unpleasant people. They're morally flexible, utterly self-involved, make terrible decisions and often live in environments that reflect their personalities. Allowing a Moshfegh character into your life will invariably end in disappointment and legal difficulties. In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the protagonist is a well-off, pretty young blonde woman with a nice apartment in Manhattan. She finds an utterly incompetent psychiatrist willing to write her an ever increasing number of prescriptions for various sedative, anti-depressants and sleeping aids and sets out to enjoy a year of unconsciousness. It doesn't quite go the way she'd envisioned. Her only friend keeps showing up and she keeps needing new pharmaceuticals to stay asleep. The character in this novel begin as shallow, unpleasant person and while she remains true to herself, Moshfegh forces her to develop and grow despite her intense desire to avoid everything. This is one of the best novels I've read this year.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Ottessa Moshfegh's book was very hyped. I also have her previous novel which I will read next because I have it and it is not that long. However, I would not have gotten it after reading this book. Yes, Moshfegh is an excellent writer and very creative. Her characters were unique and her premise for the novel was potentially interesting. A 26 year old pretty art major graduate(works in a gallery)from Columbia who owns her apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan and also has enough money due to an inheritance from her deceased parents decides to take a year off. How so? By finding a willing psychiatrist that provides her with unlimited amounts of sleeping pills. The psychiatrist was a very funny character as was her only friend Reva. The young woman was the narrator who was nameless(everyone seems to have nameless first person narrators) wants to escape a world she doesn't feel comfortable in although to the outside observer she has everything. The book does a decent job getting into her past with having distant parents and especially an alcoholic classic bad mom. She sets up this premise but then the book really doesn't move because it just continues showing her doing drugs(of course the amount she took should have killed her). She really isn't a likable character which is okay but the story didn't hold me. However, on the positive side her creativity and prose were great. I will read "Eileen" which was up for the Booker Prize in 2015. Hopefully, I will enjoy that more. It is interesting to see how much the critics like this book but I did read Amazon 3 star reviews from people who had loved her previous books but were disappointed in this book. My review on "Eileen" will be up here soon.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I loved the prose and voice of the narrator. It’s a great read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Was totally enthralled by this. Did not expect such a premise to hold so much.
    I raced through it and enjoyed it very much!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a very good yarn if you can stand a few rather gross and graphic descriptions, but that's not anywhere near the whole thing; that's just Moshfegh's's way sometimes. Her works often feature somewhat grotesque characters.
    The unnamed protagonist is quite disturbed mentally, but at the same time she's sympathetic in her own peculiar way, bright and sometimes funny while full of anger and self-pity and pills. Mostly pills to let her stay asleep for long periods of time. The narrator, Julia Whelan, is excellent as always.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Story of two souls. The payoff is worth the journey.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The unnamed teller of this story is arrogant, cruel, and funny. A delightfully insane shrink ( Dr Tuttle) is involved also.

    Listened to the audiobook, the voice acting was fine.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is a very odd book. The main character is very unbelievable although I suppose could exist in a certain Manhattan world. I was not enraptured by this book and just wanted to get through it. I guess it is just not my type of fiction as others seem to have enjoyed it. The ending was not very satisfying and I wish I had spent my time on more worthwhile reads.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The main character keeps taking insane (unrealistic) amounts and combinations of prescription drugs prescribed to her by the funny caricature of the crazy psychiatrist, and I kept on suspending my disbelief for the sake of the parody. I disagree with another reviewer who preferred the first half of the book, before the weird, long-term sleep experiment/art project began. I LIKED the weird long-term sleep experiment/art project. The action of the book rushes towards 9/11/2001, and ends there, fortunately in an unsentimental way.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    We never learn her name but her privileged background can't keep her from experiencing remarkable loss. Her grief & depression (words she never uses) has sparked a very fitting and unique "project" that is seems like it would be a dream, but is it?
    Moshfegh's telling is heartbreaking, maddening and laugh out loud funny; this beautifully odd novel is one you'll fall for and will keep you up late reading.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    With the help of what may be the worst psychiatrist in New York City, a nameless narrator in her 20s decides to sleep away the year. Which she does, to blackly comic results. It's weird and misanthropic, though not as intense as Eileen, and not that much happens--and yet the narrator's basic awfulness is somehow compelling.

    (Small note: the copy editors were asleep. I caught spelling errors and completely contradictory information on the narrator's age in multiple places.)
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The nameless narrator- a slim, beautiful, wealthy, seriously screwed -up New York 20-something retreats into a netherworld of drug-induced Lethe. To keep a novel going and the reader engaged on that basis is quite an achievement, and in a work quite as weird and surreal as "Eileen", Ms Moshfegh pretty much succeeds.As her days and nights meld into one amorphous pill-popping, video-watching nothingness, punctuated by trips to her inept, enabling psychiatrist for more supplies; visits from a troubled friend and occasional contact with a predatory ex, one wonders how it can ever reach any kind of conclusion..Clever, entertaining, well-written and entirely original.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Ugh! I almost stopped reading this and I should have but I have a confession to make. I read the last page to see if it ended on an interesting note. It did, or so I thought, but when I continued it was just more of the same drivel. Oh, I'm so tired! I'm blond and tall and beautiful and my mother was awful and I went to this really awful school, Columbia, and I just need a break filled with lots of pills, videos, and sleeping. For a year. Oh give me a break.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    My only fiction title of Q2, but man did I pick an intense one. The unnamed protagonist is an attractive early 20s woman in NYC, with a Columbia degree and enough inherited money for an Upper East Side condo and anything else she desires. Yet the plot slowly reveals how unhappy and almost alone she is in the world, a product of aloof parents and a college boyfriend who mostly treated her as a side piece. She copes with a plan to go all-in on medicating herself, via a crooked psychiatrist, with plans to be unconscious or at least unaware for days at a time. In the process she actively excludes her single true friend from what could be a more therapeutic recovery. Heartbreaking, especially if you've known substance abuse in your or someone else's lives, but very very sharp and poignant.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I just loved this book, it was like being in the room with her. I loved the honest portrayal of thoughts, their brutality, their vulnerability, and their unbidden-ness. I loved the idea of removing oneself from ones life but being able to come back regenerated. I was jealous in no small measure.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Some years ago, I decided to reread The Catcher in the Rye; I suspected that my older self would find it overrated but I was surprised to find it far more applicable to middle age than to my reading it as a cavalier kid. After all, how would a school boy appreciate the depths of depression and grief that Holden Caulfield was enduring? So, imagine my surprise in finding an unlikely connection between young Holden and the unnamed narrator of this novel. She is a young, very pretty, and a rather wealthy Manhattanite, made rich by the death of her rich parents. She is also depressed to the point of being catatonic. And how does she cope? She hibernates into a cocoon of pharmaceuticals, her lunatic therapist (who gives her prescriptions), one bulimic friend, and the Egyptians staffing a nearby bodega, where she buys her coffee and sundries. Her looks get her a position of ennui inside a 'cutting edge' art gallery, her therapist is the most comical and worst in the entire world, and her 'bestie' has even more issues than she does. And, as the year passes, her acquired drug fueled routine takes on the bleakest comedic aspect imaginable, save for the overall tonality of torpor, depression, and futility. No mistake about it: the story herein is so morbid and dark that it eventually takes on a comedic sensibility that is overwhelming! So funny! (And also, a manual about better living through chemistry!)
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    What an interesting journey in the narrator's brain... Funny, sad, touching, frustrating. There were a few parts I thought were a bit too cartoonish or contrived, but I ended the book feeling a lot of compassion for a challenging person.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Absurdiudestaan huolimatta vähän samaistuttava. Maailmahan on monesti aika perseestä, joskus tauko voisi tehdä hyvää. Jos ihmissuhteet on huonoja ja työkin on syvältä, en ihmettele että nukkuminen houkuttelee. Talvella tuntuu yleensä siltä että voisin itsekin helposti vaan nukkua eikä siihen tarvittaisi edes kovin paljoa unilääkkeitä. Tässä käsitellään välillä hauskastikin muun muassa masennusta, medikalisaatiota, pinnallisuutta, ulkonäkökeskeisyyttä ja nyky-yhteiskuntaa. Jotkut jutut menee vähän yli (kuten psykiatri, hahmo ei ollut överiydessään yhtään hauska), mutta kaikkiaan ihan kiinnostava kirja kuitenkin. Pettymyksiä: Alkuteoksen nimi on huomattavasti parempi kuin suomennoksen. Alkuteoksen kansi on huikea, suomennoksen kansi on lattea. Nyt harmittaa etten lukenut alkuteosta.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I decided to read this book because I'd heard a lot of good buzz about it and the premise (a woman decides to spend a year sleeping/awake but in too much of a haze to be really aware as a way of escaping from her life) intrigued me, but I just couldn't get into it--though it did have that interesting premise and the writing was at times quite good, the main character was just so incredibly unlikable (particularly in the way she described and related to the other people in her life) that I found it impossible not just to relate to her but to even care about what happened to her. There's a way to create unlikable characters that still allows them to be compelling enough that you want to follow their story, but this was not it.