By It’s been a while since I’ve written a book recommendation list post, but recently, as I found myself perusing the Internet for suggestions on media to replace the void left by the show I had recently finished watching (rather than going straight to watching it again, as I was fairly tempted to do) I was reminded of how useful, and fun to write, these types of posts are.
Like many people, I was introduced to Ottessa Moshfegh after reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which is probably her most successful book. I am a huge fan of Ottessa Moshfegh generally–she is one of my favorite authors– and I found My Year of Rest and Relaxation both compulsively readable and nauseating. The story of a woman seeking to sleep through an entire year to escape her life was probably the best think I could have read during the depressive episode I had in 2022, and it may in fact have kicked off my penchant for unlikable and/or unstable heroines.
In the years that followed, I have sought out books with a similar vibe: an alienated, female main character with explicit or implicit psychological neuroses, navigating her life in self-destructive ways, or something to that effect. There is some strange catharsis in these narratives for me, and, based on the popularity of these stories, likely for others as well.
Here are 10 books that remind me of Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation based on their general vibe. These books usually feature first-person narration by a woman who is isolated and often unwell, with similar slice-of-life, melancholy and bizarre elements as My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
1) Pretend I’m Dead by Jen Beagin
““He was one of the fortunate ones. He’d emerged from childhood a whole person and his past wasn’t some vast immovable mass with its own weather system.””
Pretend I’m Dead follows Mona, a 24-year-old house cleaner who, after an ill-fated relationship with a drug user she met when handing out needles, floats aimlessly through a bizarre gauntlet of self-discovery and interesting characters. I felt this book was very reminiscent of Moshfegh.
2) Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
“I looked so boring, lifeless, immune and unaffected, but in truth I was always furious, seething, my thoughts racing, my mind like a killer’s. It was easy to hide behind the dull face I wore, moping around. I really thought I had everybody fooled. And I didn’t really read books about flowers or home economics. I liked books about awful things—murder, illness, death.”
Is it cheating to put another one of Moshfegh’s books on this list? Maybe, maybe not, but Eileen is undoubtedly the most similar to My Year of Rest and Relaxation out of her other works. I was thoroughly disgusted by this book, yet at once deeply captivated by this story about a deeply disturbed woman scarred by childhood abuse.
3) The New Me by Halle Butler
“I’m still trying to make the dream possible: still might finish my cleaning project, still might sign up for that yoga class, still might, still might. I step into the shower and almost faint, an image of taking the day by the throat and bashing its head against the wall floating in my mind.”
Halle Butler’s The New Me follows Millie, a 30-year-old woman who hates her job and life more generally. When she gets a better job offer, she decides to reinvent her life, but it doesn’t work out the way she might have hoped.
4) Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
“The human psyche evolved in order to defend itself against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defense system – it makes sure we’ll never understand what’s going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible for us to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.”
Janina Duszejko is the anti-hero and narrator of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. An eccentric and elderly woman who lives in a remote village, she has a strong connection to and respect for animals, as well as an obsession with astrology and the poetry of William Blake, which she translates into Polish with one of her neighbors.
The story kicks off when Janina and the neighbor she nicknames Oddball find another person in their neighborhood dead, apparently from choking on a bone of the deer he hunted and ate.
Read my blog review
5) Surfacing by Margaret Atwood
“The trouble some people have being German, I thought, I have being human. In a way it was stupid to be more disturbed by a dead bird than by those other things, the wars and riots and the massacres in the newspapers. But for the wars and riots there was always an explanation, people wrote books about them saying why they happened: the death of the heron was causeless, undiluted.”
While Margaret Atwood is most known for The Handmaid’s Tale, she has written a ton of really great books beyond that. Surfacing is a strange novel about a woman who goes to a secluded island in Quebec to look for her father, who went missing. It’s written in a pretty abstract and open-to-interpretation way, but the themes of alienation and the beautiful writing generally reminded me of the other books on this list.
6) Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
“I realised my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn’t make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn’t make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful.”
Sally Rooney is an immensely popular author, and Conversations with Friends is probably my favorite book by her. It follows a girl named Frances, 21 years old, pretentious and depressive, and her relationships, particularly after she meets and befriends an older couple.
7) Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter
“When you’re young, every part of life seems big and monumental. Once older you can see it for what it is: smaller pieces of a larger game you have no choice but to play.”
Ripe follows a woman named Cassie as she navigates a life amidst late-stage capitalism, overworked at a startup with questionable business practices and dealing with tense familial relationships and an unfulfilling romantic relationship.
8) The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir
“My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.“
The Woman Destroyed is quite a bit older than the others on this list, but it gives me similar vibes. It follows three different women as they navigate intense personal crises.
Read my blog review
9) Big Swiss by Jen Beagin
“She had trouble being in her body in general, which was why she liked to be roughed up by the elements and was always either sunburned, windblown, or damp from the rain.”
Another Jen Beagin novel. The parallels are just too clear to leave this one out! Big Swiss is bizarre, grotesque, navel-gazing and strangely addictive. It follows a woman, Greta, whose job is to transcribe the sessions of her boss, a quack sex coach. She becomes obsessed with one particular client of his, whom she names “Big Swiss.”
10) Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet
“I had been having nasty, malicious thoughts for as long as I could remember, but that little lock granted me licence. Here was a book in which I could record and confine them.”
Finally, we have the book that I have most recently read on this list: Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet. The main character of this book is strange and strangely-fascinating, to say the least. The novel follows her quest to investigate the weird psychotherapist she believes caused her sister’s suicide, as she goes undercover as a client.
Have you read any of these books? Do you have other suggestions of books that remind you of My Year of Rest and Relaxation? If so, leave a comment!
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