Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of rest and relaxation.
A little background on the book. 
In the novel the protagonist undertakes a self imposed year of sleep.
Her reasons…dealing with immense grief, dissatisfaction with how her life is and needing a hard reset on living.
Her means? illegal pharmaceutical and psychiatric intervention.
She is not a typical lead character. She is rude in the name of brutal honesty, lies and manipulates to get her way, absolutely does not even try to make a genuine connection with anyone.
The relationships she does share are just as noxious as she is.
All that said, she’s the most human protagonist.
She’s flawed and does not care about anything but her own dangerous and delusional idea about how she can heal : Daily dosing herself with antidepressants and barbiturates.
She is not plagued by a moral compass or a bigger purpose in life.
She is extremely numb and hates being alive.
Her only motivation is to sleep away her numbness for a whole year and hopefully wake up not a better person just wake up healed.
The painting the cover art is based on “The Portrait of a Young Woman in White” is accredited to Jacques-Louis David, but in actuality there is no solid evidence it was done by the famous Neoclassical painter.
The actual painter is anonymous and nameless.
Much like our nameless protagonist.
In typical Neoclassical fashion the upper class woman is painted with every ideal of female beauty in mind. She is physically attractive, outwardly in sereine restraint and in quiet contemplation, there’s more to her. But to the outside world she’s always the subject of adoration.
Our Nameless protagonist often describes herself a rich, privileged, beautiful woman conventionally so, that she often garners sexual attention from men wherever she goes and women generally envy and hate her. She includes her best friend in this list of women.
Internally she is always lost in her hunger for sleep. She eats and walks and talks and exists, but with grief and an apathy for life weighing her down, there is a constant hum wanting to end the day as soon as it starts.
Her need for complete withdrawal and isolation in search for inner peace is never revealed to anyone in her life. The only thing privy to this information is her own internal monologue.
The painting visually encapsulates the protagonists need for transformation/transcendence through prolonged drug induced sleep.
The woman’s face captures the protagonist’s true feelings about living in a chaotic world where she constantly feels alien and too slow to function.
She doesn’t want to be here, she’d rather be anywhere but here.
She’d rather be asleep.
