11 Of The Best Books Like My Year Of Rest And Relaxation By Ottessa Moshfegh

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“I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.”

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Dark feminine literature? Books with unhinged female leads? Existential fiction recommendations? Count us in. Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation has become a dark cult classic for readers interested in flawed female protagonists, existential themes, and the melancholy allure of “sad girl” literature. Whether you’re looking for more books like My Year of Rest and Relaxation, novels that explore mental health and isolation, or stories featuring unsettling character studies, these recommendations all capture the same raw emotional energy and biting social commentary that have made Moshfegh’s books such hits. These novels dive into the minds of women teetering on the edge, offering bold and brutal honesty. If you’re craving fiction that loves discomfort and introspection, join us at What We Reading for the best books like My Year of Rest and Relaxation. 

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My Year Of Rest And Relaxation Summary

Darkly comic, unsettling, and alluringly hypnotic, My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh centres around a woman living in early 2000s New York City who decides to spend an entire year fast asleep. Beautiful, affluent, and recently orphaned, she’s been cut adrift from the world and is emotionally numbed. Searching for an escape from her pain and the pressures surrounding her, she embarks on an absurd experiment – concocting a mixture of sleeping pills, antidepressants, and shady psychiatric advice to close herself entirely. 

My Year of Rest and Relaxation explores themes of identity, depression, and the disintegration of one’s self through sharp wit and emotional depth. Moshfegh’s female narrator is both unlikable and oddly relatable to readers, with her sense of detachment shrouding an unmistakable vulnerability. 

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Eileen – Ottessa Moshfegh

First up on our list of books like My Year of Rest and Relaxation is another one of Ottessa Moshfegh’s most delicious books, Eileen. Set in a dreary Massachusetts town in the 1960s, the story revolves around Eileen Dunlop, a lonely, repressed young woman trapped in a life of drudgery. She lives with her alcoholic father and works at a boys’ prison, where she fosters disturbing fantasies and self-destructive impulses. Eileen’s existence is bleak and stifling until the arrival of Rebecca, a glamorous, enigmatic new prison counsellor who offers Eileen a taste of liberation. 

What starts out as a fascination soon spirals into obsession, leading to a shocking act that upends Eileen’s life forever. With its unhinged female lead, grim humour and existential tone, Eileen is a brilliant portrait of alienation and female rage, perfect for anyone drawn to dark feminine fiction, mental unravelling, and morally complex narratives. 

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The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is a haunting, semi-biographical novel that charts a young woman’s descent into depression. Set against the backdrop of the 1950s, the book follows Esther Greenwood, a bright and ambitious college student who bags a prized scholarship in New York City. But, beneath the surface of glamour and achievement, Esther soon begins to unravel both emotionally and mentally. 

Wrestling with the weight of expectation, identity, and an increasingly gnawing feeling of isolation, she soon finds herself spiralling into a deep psychological crisis. Presented with sharp, lyrical prose similar to My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Plath hammers home the suffocating effects of mental illness, which she famously likens to being caught beneath a bell jar. Hailed as one of the best books about mental health and womanhood, The Bell Jar is introspective, poignant, and a modern classic that reveals the fragility of our minds. 

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Boy Parts – Eliza Clark

Irina obsessively takes explicit photos of the average-looking men she persuades to model for her, plucked off the streets of Newcastle. Placed on a sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and presenting an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. 

The news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, centred around Irina’s relationship with her obsessive best friend, a shy young man from her local supermarket who has caught her attention. Eliza Clark’s stunning debut novel, Boy Parts, is a pitch-black comedy, both shocking and hilarious, that pulls the curtain back on the regions of sexuality and gender roles in the twenty-first century, perfect for anyone who loves Ottessa Moshfegh’s work. 

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The New Me – Halle Butler

Thirty-year-old Millie just can’t pull it together. Misanthropic and morose, she spends her time counting down the hours at her temp job before returning home to an empty apartment and fixating on the small ways she might change her life. Then she watches TV until she falls asleep, kickstarting the cycle into gear again. 

When the possibility for a full-time job arises, it appears to bring the better she’s always envisioning, one that involves nicer clothes, fresh food, and perhaps even financial independence. But with it also comes the realisation, lurking beneath the surface, of just how hollow that vision has become. Darkly hilarious, devastating, and often called one of the best readalikes for My Year of Rest and Relaxation, The New Me is a dizzying descent into the mind of a young woman trapped in the funhouse of post-capitalist consumer culture. 

Acts Of Desperation – Megan Nolan

In the very first scene of this provocative, introspective novel, an unnamed narrator meets a magnetic writer named Ciaran and falls, against her better judgment, completely within his thrall. After a brief, all-consuming romance, he suddenly rejects her, sending her spiralling into a descent of jealous obsession and longing. If he ever comes back to her, she resolves to cling to him and his love no matter the cost, even if it destroys her… 

Part breathless, part lucid critique, Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation renders a consciousness split between rebellion and submission, between escaping degradation and eroticising it, between loving and being loved. Like My Year of Rest and Relaxation, it features unsettling, electric precision in its efforts to answer: Why do we want what we want, and how do we want it? 

Bunny – Mona Awad

Samantha Heather Maceky couldn’t be more of an outsider if she tried in her small, highly selective MFA program at Warren University in New England. A scholarship student who much prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is entirely repelled by the rest of her fiction writing class – a clique of unbearable, twee rich girls who call one another ‘Bunny,’ all of whom seem to have mastered the art of moving and speaking as one. 

Yet, everything changes when Samantha is suddenly and surprisingly invited to join the Bunnies’ infamous Smut Salon. As she is pulled further into the Bunnies’ sinister yet saccharine world, the edges of reality soon begin to blur. Another one of the best female-led books like My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Mona Awad’s Bunny delves into loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic, terrible potential of imagination. 

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Checkout 19 – Claire-Louise Bennett

In a working-class town in a county west of London, a schoolgirl scribbles stories in the pages of her exercise book, gripped by the first waves of her imagination. As she grows, everything and everyone she meets becomes fuel for a burning talent. The large Russian man in the ancient maroon car who careens around the grocery store where she works hands her a copy of Beyond Good and Evil. Another addition to the heaps of other books, she both loses and finds herself. 

The thrill of learning to conjure characters and scenarios in her head is matched by the exhilaration of forging her own path in the world, the two kinds of ingenuity kindling to a brilliant configuration. Checkout 19 is Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut that serves as a radical demonstration of the power of imagination, through the story of a young woman discovering her own genius. 

Milk Fed – Melissa Broder

Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed is a darkly comic, emotionally raw novel about hunger, both literal and metaphorical. Rachel is a twenty-four-year-old lapsed Jew living in Los Angeles, obsessed with calorie counting and her toxic relationship with her overbearing mother. When her therapist challenges her to take a break from her mother and rigid eating habits, Rachel’s carefully-constructed world starts to fracture. She meets Miriam, a bold and unapologetically voluptuous Orthodox woman working at a frozen yoghurt shop. As Rachel is hauled into Miriam’s warmth, appetite, and mystery, her desire and identity begin to shift in uncomfortable ways. 

Milk Fed explores themes of obsession, self-worth, sexuality, and spiritual yearning, all through the perspective of a deeply flawed yet compelling narrator. Perfect for anyone who loved My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Broder’s work takes readers through a tour of the messy intersections of body, control, and emotional voids. 

Luster – Raven Leilani

Edie is doing what she can to survive. She’s messing up in her all-white admin job, is sleeping with the wrong men, and has failed at the only thing that has ever given her purpose, painting. No one seems to care that she doesn’t know what she’s doing with her life beyond looking for the next hookup. And then she meets Eric, a middle-aged man with a family. His wife has agreed to a sort of open marriage, and their adopted Black daughter doesn’t have anyone to show her how to do her hair. 

As if navigating the constantly shifting landscape of sexual and racial politics wasn’t already hard enough as a Black woman, Edie suddenly finds herself falling head-first into Eric’s home and family. Another one of the best books like My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Luster is a painfully funny debut about what it means to be young now. 

Pizza Girl – Jean Kyoung Frazier

Eighteen years old, pregnant, and working as a pizza delivery girl in suburban Los Angeles, Pizza Girl’s charmingly dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in total denial about it. She’s grieving the death of her father, avoiding her supportive mother and doting boyfriend, and flagrantly ignoring her future. Her world is soon opened when she becomes obsessed with Jenny, a new mother in the area who comes to depend on weekly deliveries.

As one woman looks toward motherhood and the other toward middle age, the relationship between the two begins to blur in strange, complicated, and ultimately heartbreaking ways. Similar to My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Pizza Girl is bold, tender, and propulsive in its depiction of a flawed young woman attempting to find her place in the world. 

Nightbitch – Rachel Yoder

At home full-time with her two-year-old son, an artist finds she is struggling. She is isolated and exhausted. Her husband, constantly travelling for his work, calls her from faraway hotel rooms. One more toddler bedtime, and she worries she might lose her mind. Instead, quite suddenly, she begins gaining new things, surprising things that occur one night when her child refuses to sleep. Sharper canines. Strange new patches of hair. New appetites, new instincts. And, deep within her, a new voice…

With its sharp eye on contemporary womanhood and the structures of power, Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch is one of the best books like My Year of Rest and Relaxation that is metaphorical, visceral, and unhinged in all the best ways. 

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