Recommendations
Books Like My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Best books to read after My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation is the dark satirical New York novel about a beautiful, privileged woman who medicates herself into a year of sleep. These recommendations continue the Moshfegh canon, explore the tradition of the literary novel of female interiority and dark comedy, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the book about a woman who withdraws from a world she cannot quite inhabit.
- 1Buy
Eileen
by Ottessa Moshfegh
The companion debut Moshfegh — Eileen Dunlop, a young woman working at a Massachusetts juvenile prison in 1964, narrating a turning point in her life from the perspective of her older self; introduces Moshfegh's characteristic voice of self-aware, detached, unreliable female narration in a darker and more grotesque setting than My Year of Rest.
- 2Buy
Lapvona
by Ottessa Moshfegh
The most recent major Moshfegh — a medieval village and its grotesque inhabitants, written in the same detached, occasionally shocking prose as My Year of Rest but in a completely different register; her most formally strange and uncompromising work, for readers who want to see how far the Moshfegh voice can be pushed.
- 3Buy
McGlue
by Ottessa Moshfegh
Moshfegh's novella — a nineteenth-century sailor who may have murdered his best friend, narrated in a hallucinatory, blackout-drunk first person; the shortest Moshfegh and the one that best prepares you for the extremity of her subsequent work.
- 4Buy
Normal People
by Sally Rooney
The companion literary novel of cool, stripped female consciousness — Marianne and Connell in Ireland; where My Year of Rest is satirical and detached, Normal People is more emotionally warm, but both share an interest in young women who are difficult to love and who construct elaborate defenses against intimacy.
- 5Buy
Exciting Times
by Naoise Dolan
The companion in the tradition of the dry literary novel of female detachment — Ava in Hong Kong, navigating two relationships; shares My Year of Rest's mode of an intelligent, emotionally defended female narrator describing her situation with ironic precision rather than emotional engagement.
- 6Buy
The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
The predecessor literary novel about a young woman's withdrawal from a world she cannot inhabit — Esther Greenwood in New York in the 1950s, the breakdown and the hospital; the foundational text in the tradition of the literary novel about a young woman's inability to function in the world that is expected of her.
- 7Buy
Dept. of Speculation
by Jenny Offill
The companion literary novel of female consciousness under pressure — Offill's fragmented account of a woman navigating marriage, motherhood, and infidelity; shares My Year of Rest's interest in a woman attempting to escape the demands of her own consciousness, though Offill's form is more formally experimental.
- 8Buy
The Virgin Suicides
by Jeffrey Eugenides
The companion in the tradition of the literary novel about beautiful women who withdraw from the world irrevocably — the Lisbon sisters in suburban Michigan; shares My Year of Rest's interest in the mythology of the withdrawn, beautiful woman and what that mythology conceals about the actual experience of female depression.
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