My Year of Rest and Relaxation is Moshfegh's second novel, following Eileen (2015, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize),[1] as well as a novella (McGlue, 2014) and a short story collection (Homesick for Another World, 2017).[2] 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,[2] but she called off the interview and the project took a different tack.[3]
Of her experience writing the novel, Moshfegh said:
I feel like the book was successful in that I graduated out of a lot of those concerns by writing the book. 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.[4]
My Year of Rest and Relaxation was published on July 10, 2018, by Penguin Press.[5]
