My Year of Rest and Relaxation characters

Also known as The narrator

Appears from the start

An unnamed twenty-six-year-old living alone in an inherited Upper East Side apartment in 2000. Financially secure but emotionally numb after her parents' deaths, she wants to spend as much of a year as possible asleep. She approaches the project as an attempt to erase her existing life and wake into a different one.

Appears from the start

The narrator's former college roommate and only persistent friend. Reva works hard at a corporate job, worries about appearance and status, and repeatedly seeks comfort from someone who often responds with cruelty or indifference.

Appears from the start

An eccentric psychiatrist whom the narrator consults for sleeping medication. Distracted and credulous, she accepts alarming symptoms with little scrutiny and prescribes an expanding collection of sedatives and anti-anxiety drugs.

Appears from the start

The narrator's older former boyfriend, an emotionally withholding finance professional who continues to summon her on his terms. Her attachment to him persists despite his casual contempt and unwillingness to offer a stable relationship.

First appears in chapter 2

The narrator's late mother, remembered as beautiful, critical, and absorbed by appearances and her own unhappiness. Her emotional distance helped shape the narrator's habit of treating detachment as protection.

First appears in chapter 2

The narrator's late father, a professor whose reserve and illness made him remote within the family. Memories of his decline and death surface as she tries to sleep through the grief she has never directly processed.

First appears in chapter 3

The director of Ducat, the fashionable and deliberately provocative art gallery where the narrator once worked. Natasha values novelty, social attention, and the gallery's image, regarding both employees and artists largely through their usefulness to that scene.

First appears in chapter 6

A young artist associated with the Ducat gallery. Ambitious and alert to spectacle, he becomes useful when the narrator needs someone willing to turn her strange private experiment into an art project.

First appears in chapter 4

Reva's mother, whose serious illness intensifies Reva's fear and need for support. The narrator encounters this family crisis mainly through Reva's visits and calls, which challenge her attempt to shut other people out.