A darkly comic cult favorite about sleeping through a year of your life — proof that Julia Whelan can do deadpan literary fiction as well as anyone.
It's the year 2000 in Manhattan, and our unnamed narrator seems to have everything: young, thin, beautiful, a Columbia degree, an Upper East Side apartment, an inheritance, an easy art-gallery job. But beneath it is a numb, vacuous grief, and she hatches a plan to fix herself by checking out of life entirely — sleeping through an entire year with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in literature and a cabinet of pills. Around her orbit her abrasive friend Reva and a callous ex-boyfriend, while she pursues oblivion as a strange form of self-repair. Ottessa Moshfegh's novel is bleak, bitingly funny, and divisive by design — a sharp satire of privilege, art-world emptiness, and the lengths we go to avoid feeling.
The genius of this audiobook is tonal. On the page, the narrator's detachment can read as cold; in Julia Whelan's hands, it becomes pitch-black comedy. Her delivery is flat, languid, faintly numb — exactly the register the book needs — and that restraint is what makes the funniest, bleakest lines land. She gives Reva a perfect grating energy and the psychiatrist a distracted absurdity, sharpening the satire around the narrator's fog. It won the AudioFile Earphones Award, and on a list of Whelan's work it earns its place by showing range: after the warmth of her romances and the gravity of Educated, this is her doing deadpan literary fiction, and doing it brilliantly.
Readers of literary fiction and dark comedy, anyone drawn to unlikable-but-magnetic narrators, and listeners who want to hear what Julia Whelan can do outside romance and memoir. At seven hours, it's a short, sharp change of pace.
If you need plot momentum, warmth, or a character to root for, this offers none of those on purpose. It's bleak and provocative, with frank explorations of grief and numbness — decidedly not a comfort listen.
Listen to it. It won't be for everyone, but Whelan's deadpan performance is the ideal way into Moshfegh's strange, funny, unsettling cult favorite — and the best short demonstration of her range you'll find.