My Year of Rest and Relaxation

The canonical novel of female withdrawal — Esther Greenwood's descent mirrors the narrator's, but Plath's narrator wants to feel and can't, while Moshfegh's can and won't

Meursault's affectless narration is the literary ancestor of Moshfegh's flat prose — both novels use emotional blankness as a philosophical position

Same privileged numbness, same affectless register, same refusal to moralize — Ellis's 1985 Los Angeles is the direct precursor to Moshfegh's 2001 Manhattan

DeLillo's meditation on death anxiety and consumer culture in Reagan's America anticipates Moshfegh's critique of pharmaceutical capitalism and the will to numbness

Moshfegh's debut novel — another deeply unpleasant female narrator, another refusal of likability, but set in the 1960s with a thriller plot rather than a hibernation plot

Another millennial novel of emotional withdrawal and performed detachment — Rooney's narrator intellectualizes where Moshfegh's sedates, but both are running from feeling