During her freshman year in college, both of her parents died-first her father from cancer, then her mother in a suicide caused by an interaction between psychiatric medications and alcohol. The unnamed narrator, a slender and beautiful blonde from a wealthy WASP family, is a recent graduate of Columbia University, where she majored in art history. My Year of Rest and Relaxation was published on July 10, 2018, by Penguin Press. When I wrote the book, my passion and anger were located much more outwardly and so the tone of the narrator, who I think a very angry person, is not something I relate to anymore. I feel like the book was successful in that I graduated out of a lot of those concerns by writing the book.

Of her experience writing the novel, Moshfegh said: Moshfegh initially planned My Year of Rest and Relaxation to be focused primarily on the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, even reaching out to terrorism expert Paul Bremer, but she called off the interview and the project took a different tack.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is Moshfegh's second novel, following Eileen (2015, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize), as well as a novella ( McGlue, 2014) and a short story collection ( Homesick for Another World, 2017). Moshfegh's second novel, it is set in New York City in 20 and follows an unnamed protagonist as she gradually escalates her use of prescription medications in an attempt to sleep for an entire year. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a 2018 novel by American author Ottessa Moshfegh.

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