Just finished Convenience Store Woman and I loved it.

It's genuinely funny in this dry, deadpan way, but it also made me feel a little rattled (in a good way). Beneath the simple premise -- a woman who works at a convenience store -- it's really about how hard people will work to shove you into a "normal" shape, and how quickly they decide something is wrong with you if you don't fit. Especially for those of us who aren't neurotypical.

What felt painfully real to me is the masking. The way she studies people, borrows scripts, adjusts her voice, tries to get the timing right. Like she's constantly translating herself. And the book doesn't treat that like a cute quirk. It's tiring. It's lonely. It's also weirdly logical, because so many of the rules everyone else seems to "just know" are never actually said out loud.

I also loved how the convenience store isn't framed as some sad placeholder. It's structure. It's clear expectations. It's a place where she can be competent and steady without having to play psychic games about what other people want from her.

Overall, this book nails the tension between selfhood and social pressure, especially the very gendered expectations around what a "real" adult life is supposed to look like. As a neurodivergent reader, a lot of that pressure reads as deeply stupid (affectionate, but still)... and that's exactly why it felt validating. Sharp, uncomfortable, and oddly comforting at the same time.

There's a particular kind of book that's less interested in entertaining you than in pinning you to the wall for a while. If The Catcher in the Rye is the classic version of this, with Holden's alienation and defensiveness doing most of the heavy lifting, My Year of Rest and Relaxation feels like its colder, more contemporary cousin: a narrator who's hard to like, hard to root for, and somehow still hard to look away from.

The narrator is... not likable. And in my opinion she doesn't get redeemed in any satisfying, conventional way. The pacing is slow, and parts of the middle feel stagnant or even boring. I get why that turns people off. The dullness and repetition mirror numbness and self-erasure. It's uncomfortable on purpose.

One detail that stuck with me was that we never learn the narrator's name. I didn't fully clock it until after I finished, and then it hit like a quiet gut punch. It reinforces the sense that she's disappearing from herself, and maybe doesn't even want to be a person in a fully formed way.

Weirdly, the most redeeming thread for me was her friendship with Reva. Reva is messy and annoying and clearly struggling too, but she's the only friend who consistently shows up. The narrator seems aware she's a bad friend, and there's something painfully human about that awareness. I also loved learning what first connected them: Reva being willing to sit with the narrator's grief when other people glossed over it. That felt profound, and it's the kind of quiet witnessing I don't see enough in fiction. Or real life.

I stick with books like this even when the character is hard to like and the plot is thin because there's still something to learn from being pushed around by a story. It doesn't have to feel good to be worth reading. And as a white woman, I do think there's value in looking at the uglier edges of privilege and emptiness on the page, even when it's not flattering or inspiring. Not because anyone is obligated to read this kind of thing - they're not - but because for me, it's a mirror I probably shouldn't look away from.

This isn't a comfort read. It's a book that dares you to sit in it. If you're in the mood for that, it's a memorable, weirdly honest experience.