Ottessa Moshfegh and I used to work together at a tiny New York City publisher. Since then, she’s become an increasingly well-known fiction writer. Her last novel, Eileen, came close to winning the 2016 Booker Prize! Her latest novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, is a mesmerizing portrait of a woman’s attempt to—with the help of pills and a year’s worth of sleep—pupate, alone in her apartment, and emerge reborn. In urgent and assured prose, Moshfegh frames her unnamed narrator’s spiral-out with the tension of a page-turning thriller. Interviewed by phone from a vacation in Hawaii, we spoke of Moshfegh’s attention to detail, her observational detachment, and how bad I was at my former job.