The story is based on a nameless narrator who is unable to understand and express her feelings. The narrator has just graduated from Columbia University and is residing in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She lost both of her parents during her final year at the university, and comments on her distant relationship with them even while they were alive. Having lost complete touch with her emotions, the narrator decides to use sedatives to sleep for a full year. The narrator believes that sleep will end her emotional numbness and her grief-induced misanthropy. In her search for sleeping drugs, she comes across Dr. Tuttle, a quack who prescribes drugs without considering their side effects. Dr. Tuttle never addresses the narrator's central complaint of losing her parents.
The narrator is portrayed as a person devoid of empathy. She has an antagonistic relationship with her best friend Reva, whom she largely ignores. When Reva tells the narrator about her ailing mother, the narrator brushes aside her concerns. The narrator is also deeply annoyed by Reva's affair with her married boss. The narrator suspects that she is sad but doesn't feel it inside.
The narrator is annoyed by Reva in part because of Reva's deep concern for and adherence to social gender norms. The narrator is conventionally attractive but chooses not to fulfill the gender role demanded by society, completely ceasing all maintenance of her body and social interactions.
After mostly sleeping for the course of a year, the narrator wakes up a changed person. She proclaims that her year of sleep has worked. The narrator tried everything possible to make her life better again. The narrator was hopeful that her sleep would transform her, and she ultimately was correct.
The novel addresses the cultural conflict between healing and self-care. The form of healing that the narrator pursues appears as self-destruction (mixing several sedatives with one another and sleeping all the time). Those around her find it antisocial and disturbing. At the same time, the novel reveals how the professional and self-care-oriented behavior of those around the narrator is self-destructive and ultimately devoid of meaning.
