My Year of Rest and Relaxation is Moshfegh's second novel, following Eileen (2015, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize),[2] as well as a novella (McGlue, 2014) and a short story collection (Homesick for Another World, 2017).

[6] Set in 2000, the anonymous narrator, a slender and beautiful blonde from a wealthy WASP family, is a recent Columbia University art history graduate grappling with her personal tragedies and the pressures of societal expectations.

The narrator, however, intends to spend as few hours awake as possible, numbing herself with a steady regimen of pills and repeatedly watching middlebrow movies on her VCR until the machine finally breaks down.

After being dismissed from her art gallery job, the narrator decides to subsist on her inheritance and unemployment benefits, embarking on a year-long quest to 'reset' her life through extensive sleep.

She contacts Ping Xi, an artist represented by the gallery where she used to work, who agrees to bring her food and other necessities for four months in exchange for being allowed to make any kind of art project he wishes while she is unconscious: the only requirement is that all trace of him be gone when she wakes every three days to eat, bathe, and take another pill to put herself under again.

The narrator goes out to buy a new VCR to tape the news coverage, returning as time passes to watch the video, in particular footage of a woman leaping out of the North Tower whom she believes to be Reva.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is narrated in the first person, establishing a personage critics called "an antihero...[who] resists every stereotype of the female nurturer"[4] and "hypnotically unlikeable",[3] perhaps even "an attempt to see just how 'unlikeable' characters can get.

She argued that this novel "instead builds a façade of beauty and privilege around her characters, forcing the reader to locate repulsion somewhere deeper: in effort, in daily living, in a world that swings between tragic and banal.

[13][14] In Slate, Laura Miller praised the novel, saying, "Moshfegh excels here at setting up an immediately intriguing character and situation, then amplifying the freakishness to the point that some rupture feels inevitable.

[18] LuckyChap's Margot Robbie produced, alongside her husband Tom Ackerley,[19] a German-language stage adaptation of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Mein Jahr der Ruhe und Entspannung, which premiered in 2020 in Zürich, Switzerland, and was directed by Yana Ross.