In some ways, the narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s new novel, My Year Of Rest And Relaxation, could not be more different from her creator.

A self-confessed WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), she lives in the Upper East Side, Manhattan, in an apartment paid for with her inheritance. When she throws in her job at a modern art gallery and hibernates for a year, money is the least of her problems. Moshfegh, on the other hand, knows what it means to be poor. When she sat down to write her breakthrough novel Eileen (2016), often referred to as a “psychological thriller” or “noir”, she wanted to produce a book that would alleviate her poverty.

“I needed to be in a desperate place in order to consider writing something traditional,” she tells me on the phone from her childhood home in Boston, Massachusetts. “I had come out of a more experimental background. I had read hundreds of novels and loved them as works of art, but never considered plot until I wrote Eileen. There was a bit of repulsion on my part in having to change my creative interests according to the mainstream. But, I decided to try this experiment of writing a novel according to a patented novel-writing form.”

In the end, she abandoned the idea of writing pure genre fiction. But without that experiment, she might not be where she is today. Eileen, about a young woman who is drawn into the world of violence at a young offenders’ institute where she works, won the Pen/Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. At 37 years old,

Moshfegh is now considered one of the most radical and talented young writers in America. She was recently the subject of one of the New Yorker magazine’s Profiles.

“I didn’t make a living as a writer until I published Eileen. I was lucky that I chose to go to a grad school that provided a stipend, and I did get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. But, when I lived in New York, I was always broke. The first job I had was teaching at a Catholic school, earning $21,000 a year. I barely ate. Then I moved to China, where the cost of living is lower. I moved back to New York and worked in publishing for several years and made a similar salary. It was always a struggle and I didn’t have time to dedicate much energy to writing.” In 2007, she finally fled the city for good. She now lives in California, splitting her time between an apartment in Los Angeles and her partner’s house in the desert.

Her experience of the super-rich environs of New York has left its mark. My Year Of Rest And Relaxation is set in the year preceding the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001. The attacks provide a surprising and arresting end to the novel. But there are other reasons Moshfegh chose that year. The narrator’s disillusionment with society is, in part, a result of her experiences in the art industry. “[In] pre-9/11 New York,” says Moshfegh, “there was enough comfort – America was still living off the financial boom of the Nineties – and enough excess that culture had the space to move into absurdity.”

As the narrator says, “the art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of the political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fuelled by greed and gossip and cocaine. I might as well have worked on Wall Street. Speculation and opinions drove not only the market but the products, sadly, the values of which were hinged not to the ineffable quality of art as a sacred human ritual… but to what a bunch of rich a******s thought would ‘elevate’ their portfolios…”

Moshfegh shares her narrator’s sensibility. “Any industry that is making money off of its own people’s genius is really exploitative.

“But it has been happening since the dawn of time. It is very hard to make a living without self-exploitation as an artist… but the art world is so elitist. I can’t believe that the people who are buying [art] are actually moved by it. Art has become fashion to a lot of people, and I find that really depressing.”

She might have had to leave New York to become a professional novelist, but her achievements are also the result of hard graft. From a young age, she had a powerful determination to succeed, first as a musician. “Studying music – specifically classical music – bred into me a very high standard for myself and a discipline that borders on torture where I hold myself accountable to my highest ability, which really is an asset as a writer. I had been a pretty serious pianist as a kid. I continued to be serious about piano throughout my teenage years. I discovered I was a writer when I took a summer class in fiction writing with a guy [Peter Markus] who became my mentor for years. It was like discovering my purpose.” Does she see any parallels between writing and music? “I think there is a formal correlation in writing sentences and playing phrases in music.” It shows in her approach to writing, where her primary concern is the tone and temper of voice.

Moshfegh comes from a family of musicians. Her father is from Iran – hence her Persian name – and her mother from Croatia. Both classical musicians, they met at a music conservatory in Brussels. Moshfegh’s paternal grandfather was a businessman in Tehran. During the 1979 Islamic Revolution the family split apart and their assets were liquidated. In 1980, her parents moved to Boston. Moshfegh, one of three children, was born a year later.

America is the one place in the world where no-one should feel like an outsider, but Moshfegh did not enjoy her schooling, and was drawn to literature that explored life on the periphery. It shows in her early reading habits. “My primary influences were African-American writers like Ralph Ellison. I really love James Baldwin. He is somebody who I discovered early on and seemed separate from the tradition I was taught at school. It’s not to say I don’t appreciate Shakespeare, but there is an honesty and a radical truth in his writing that I found inspiring.”

Her penchant for outsiders extends to her own fiction. Her first novel, McGlue (2014), is narrated by a 19th-century drunk sailor who may have killed his male lover. My Year’s narrator is an insider pushed to outsider status. Her parents raise her on a diet of money and self-contempt. Her “recurring ex-boyfriend” Trevor, who works in financial services, abuses and demeans her. Halfway through her year of sleep, she remarks, “I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, and reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was my dream.”

It is an uncomfortable paradox that people pushed to the edge of society are often the best placed to identify life’s dark absurdities. Moshfegh’s novel is rich with Horatian and Juvenalian satire about how the marketplace has distorted our emotional engagement with the world. After the narrator’s parents die, she spends months shopping for beauty treatments. “I’d get face peels and pedicures, messages, waxings, haircuts. That was how I mourned, I guess. I paid strangers to make me feel good.” She also goes to a quack psychiatrist who prescribes various prescription drugs to keep her sedated and offers nihilistic advice about her psyche: “Look deeper and deeper and eventually you’ll find nothing. We’re mostly empty space.”

Moshfegh’s comic touch is evident in her short story collection, Homesick for Another World (2017). Her new novel was born out of that writing phase. “There is a comic sense, a sense of timing, and an attitude in my short stories that I wanted to capture in a novel. When I started sketching out the main character’s thinking and habituations, I was still in the realm of the short story.” She has now moved away from that form completely and currently is working on a new novel. “It takes place at the turn of the 20th century. It is about a teenage female Chinese immigrant to California, and it’s narrated by her ghost 120 years later. I don’t know how funny it will be.”

Since finishing My Year, she has found her prose style has become less satirical. But, unlike the past, this change in approach has little to do with money. “I met the love of my life, so my sense of a deeply absurd existential isolation is less intense. Also, in the last year, I lost some people who were really close to me. Meditating on the deeper questions has brought me to a place where I think it would be good to focus on a more sincere approach to the human experience, rather than seeing it all from the point of absurdity.

But,” she pauses for a moment, “I still think life is absurd.”

My Year Of Rest And Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. Jonathan Cape, £12.99. She will be at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 17.